RANDOM RANTS - SPAIN

I have to say Spain was great except for when I got locked into a public toilet in San Sebastián and the police had to be called to spring me loose. It began innocently enough; Karen had used the thing and held the door open for me to follow, but as I was standing over the bowl and starting to whizz I was suddenly sprayed with a cleaning material from nozzles in the ceiling, so I jumped back and had a moment of “WTF” and then the floor nozzles opened up and sprayed my shoes, at which point I thought “It might be a good idea to GTF out of here” and then the door wouldn’t open. Later we sussed what must have happened. Karen had constituted One Use, whereupon the WC had a “process” it needed to follow before the next person could go in. We must have perturbed that process somehow. So I’m stuck in there (but with the cleanest shoes of any man in Spain) and trying to talk to Karen through a heavy steel door. That won’t budge. My mind, at such a time, was full of…let’s say, thoughts.

Eventually Karen was able to ask for help from a saintly woman who spoke some English, and who eventually thought we should call the police. Maybe the fine public servants of San Sebastián get these calls all the time, but they didn’t seem too worked up about it. “They said you have to wait ten minutes,” Karen said. “And then what?” I inquired. “And then, I don’t know, I guess the door opens?” The saintly lady waited with my wife, much to the consternation of her impatient husband, who wanted to keep moving. I paced the steel floor of my little prison.

After a while there came a very loud sequence of alarms that sounded like an earthquake warming, and then the intermittent alarms became an unbroken blast that was like holding your ear to the outside of a hurrying fire truck, and then I admit I was scared, because I couldn’t hear what was going on outside or what Karen might be trying to tell me. After one of those minutes-that-seem-much-longer, the alarm stopped. Now what? Tentatively, I tried the door. It gave way. I emerged wetter but wiser, and realized this entire drama had taken place next to a playground. I missed the chance for an audience of delighted little kids laughing at the stupid tourist who didn’t know how a damn toilet works, but they must have been in school. Their loss. It was just Karen and the saintly lady and her put-upon husband who by now was apoplectic with impatience. I had a moment of wondering if I was worthy, as though the saintly lady would look at me coming through the door and think “Is that all?”

Otherwise San Sebastián was what it’s said to be. We watched the surfers and walked until our feet were sore and had a ton of crazy-tasty food, though I have to say I think I’m too old for the whole pinxtos thing. Both of us are. The busy places were just heaving with people and if you could even push your way inside you’d have to keep pushing until you got up to the bar counter and could point to what you wanted. That must be part of the vibe for others, but it felt like a young person’s idea of fun. In contrast to the crush at (what I surmise) were the hot joints, many others were empty or nearly so, and the forlorn pinxtos were sitting unloved on their lonely counters. I made the mistake of eating a few pieces and paid for it with thirty-six hours of flotsam-belly. Mucking about the gorgeous city in search of BART ingredients (bananas-apple-sauce-rice-toast, the cure for such things) felt worse than just to tough it out. After all the public toilet hadn’t defeated me, plus I had the cleanest shoes in all of Spain.

I have to give a shout out to a place I’d never read about in the many guides to the grandest San-S food experiences; Lanperna, where we had a stunning flight of five Gillardeau oysters, including a Normandy Coast that was/is the best oyster I’ve ever eaten. The place also has superb “real” food and I wished we’d made a dinner night of it. Hurry to it if you’re ever there.

We made the pilgrimage to Rekondo. I’m glad-ish that we did. The food was perfectly good, and the welcome warm and sassy, but what does one do with a wine list the size of a Torah, whose table of contents runs to over 30 pages? I’m scrambling to come to grips with the behemoth while the server comes repeatedly to the table to take our food order. An advance perusal would’ve been great but they don’t/can’t put its massive bulk online, they told me.  it’s certainly grandiose to have assembled such a collection, but how can anyone make it cohere at the table? I mean, we are two mere people looking through a menu of maybe two dozen options and alongside it a book with tens of thousands of wines. Please don’t think me ungrateful; Rekondo is a lovely place to eat and we had a fulfilling evening, eventually, after managing (inelegantly) to simply stage the whole thing.

We spent the rest of our trip in Rioja. For a wine lover like me, it is a region in flux and identity crisis, not because of the legion of fascinating young growers seeking to recast the wines as detailed expressions of site and variety. Those people are galvanizing. But they are working with ever-riper material in ever-hotter conditions, and it’s getting near-impossible to find a Rioja of the last fifteen years – red or white – that isn’t north of 14% alc. Nor is it confined to the avant garde; even a classic like La Rioja Alta’s “Riserva 904” had soared to a palling 14.5% in the 2015 vintage. It all spelled trouble for moderate little me, and most of the wine lists in the “best” restaurants were heavy on young vintages and offered a smattering of Grand Old Beauties, but the in-between era of late-80s to late-90s was absent.

One restaurant, El Portal in Ezcaray, served us one of the several greatest meals of our lives. And yes, meals, as we were so entranced by the first one that we returned nine days later and had another. I’m hardly a “food critic” and am unqualified to do anything more than rave when stoked and kvetch when annoyed – but: a kind of principle started to take shape, and I’ll share it here.

In cuisine – by which I mean ambitious cuisine, the shorthand for which is (sadly) Michelin stars – a kitchen coming up on a new dish will find the first 90% of effort is relatively simple and straightforward. You have a vision and you combine ingredients to bring it about. But the final 10% is where you either create the ethereal shimmer of harmony and delicacy that makes us swoon with happiness, or you stop at the arrangement of pieces. Three places in Rioja, our beloved El Portal, the electrifying Nublo in Haro, and the arrestingly beautiful Allegar In Briones, kept serving us dishes of such wisdom and balance you could hear the voices of the saints in your ear.

In contrast, two other places (including a 3-star in San Sebastián) served high-concept food of stellar quality but food where you could recognize the concept – or it felt like you could. We’d call that kind of food “edgy” or “risk-taking” and a lot of eaters would prefer it to my “cooler” preferences. But for me it’s not quite enough to see the conceptual mosaic of a dish. I want to taste the apotheosis and dissolve that comes after, when it isn’t an “idea” any more.

So, I have a proposal about cell phones in restaurants. It applies particularly to what we agree to call “fine”  or “nice” restaurants, because I don’t care what you do in Olive Garden or Applebees. My idea is, when someone takes out a cell phone at the table, they are sprayed with a fire retardant foam that blobs down from a hose in the ceiling. It doesn’t hurt them but they are coated in foam, and everyone else in the restaurant knows they are the “foam people.” Their fingers are all blobby and they can’t use their phones. I think that would work.

Another idea is, they have to surrender their phones to the host(ess) but they are given mock-up phones that look just like their phones except they only play old episodes of The Addams Family, so if they must twiddle their thumbs in the middle of a meal they just have to look at Gomez and Morticia. And after five minutes it would just be season-2 episode-3, the first 90 seconds, over and over.

We were somewhere eating incredibly beautiful food and several people at neighboring tables were thumbing their infernal devices, and I wanted to make them stop without actually hurting them. I can’t think what else to do. It’s a scourge. There’s no reason I should care except that it’s both ugly and ungrateful to be on your phone at such a time. Panhandlers have more dignity.