The best eggs in Madrid.
After 70 years working in the same place, Lucio Blazquez still going there every day. Is his tavern soul. It is his life. It's his job. His secret to success: “You have to go to bed every day thinking about going to work and not that they give you nothing. Get up every day as if you were starting, ”he says sitting at a table at the beginning of the lunch hour on any given Tuesday. Any given Tuesday in which the room is full, the bar too and it's not even two o'clock and politicians, writers have already stopped by to greet him... "And so all day," he says laughing.
Lucio, Bill Clinton, King Juan Carlos.
So all day and every day for more than 40 years, when in 1974 he took over the premises he occupied The Segovian Inn in which he had started working “at the age of 14, earning one peseta a day, working 14 hours a day and taking two hours off one afternoon every 15 days,” he recalls. But after three years of running from one table to another there, he was already getting "200 pesetas a day just in tips." He already told her Camilo Jose Cela: "Lucio, you were not born to be an employee, you were born to be a boss."
And he was soon. first in The Schottis, a restaurant near where El Mesón Segoviano was that “Cela, the painter Eduardo Vicente and the architect Eduardo Anasagasti” helped him set up. And, later, when his boss of so many years who "loved him like a son" called him to give him the transfer of the premises, she did not hesitate. she renamed it Pike House and introduced in his menu all those dishes and the quality at a good price that have made him famous worldwide.
Lucius bar.
“I have worked a lot with Spanish cuisine all my life, all the products of Spain, always the same. I buy the most expensive thing on the market and I sell it at a very fair price," he says. He is famous for not having raised prices in practically years. "Many clients tell me that price quality my house is wonderful and many friends tell me off because I charge very cheaply, but I I am the happiest man in the world because I earn to pay my employees and for them to live well, ”he says, pointing to the refrigerators of very fresh fish.
HE, THE STAR; THE EGGS, CRASHED
Everything he has on his menu "is at the level" of his most famous dish, he says. If you ask him, he prefers tripe. But nobody leaves Casa Lucio without having eaten his star dish: crashed eggs. Having made a dish as simple as eggs with potatoes become famous is a triumph. “Years ago asking for an egg was like being poor, and today I have managed, I think, to make it a luxury, but an international luxury”, he says. "Eggs have a reputation because no one makes them like I do," he says. And he tells us a little about his secret.
"First we have to charcoal cooker, which is very demanding because you have to fix it four times a year, clean it a lot, but that strength doesn't give you anything. Then the eggs are a farm in Avila very pretty, the potatoes Galicia and the oil Jaen ”, he tells. And the most important thing: "The eggs are fried at the moment they are ordered -the potatoes too-, it seems that they are fried in the air, not a drop of fat, It's a show. The yolk comes out whole, so that when you cut it, it is distributed throughout the plate.”
Will Smith, Lucio and Tommy Lee Jones.
A delicacy with evocative powers. One of those dishes that have the power of Proust's madeleine, to take you back to a past meal with your grandmother. It happened to Lucio too. From the beginning, he introduced fried eggs in the menu remembering his grandmother.
"When he was a child he rode with her on her horse, she brought food to the workers who were harvesting her and on her way they broke her eggs and she served them cut like that with the potatoes," he recalls. “I stayed with the couplet and I remembered that. She did it so as not to throw away a broken egg, and now if one breaks here, she throws it away, Not an egg comes out of that kitchen that doesn't come out perfect."