tripe with curry
"The capital of the hug" , this is how the mayor of Madrid summarizes, Manuela Carmena , the idea of the city that she has for all the people of Madrid and beyond.
It's nice. It is no longer a transcript of the image that we all have of this city of no one. Ramón Gómez de la Serna already said: “Madrid is having nothing and having everything, Madrid is improvisation and tenacity” . A bit of a meeting point, everyone's home, coffee gatherings and gin and tonics on Tuesdays, also on Tuesdays.
Also its gastronomy is, traditional and affable. Madrid are its cañas like the pintxos are in San Sebastián, because this It is a city that lives on the streets and that is how its gastronomy must also be understood: their **tortilla tapas** (slug, the omelette has to be slug), the mushrooms in the blue swan _(Calle Gravina, 19) _ or anchovies and bravas on so many tables under the spring sun —what a beauty Madrid in May: its terraces and its acacias, its vibration (it's unique) and that 'living now' so much ours because time is going, it's going away.
Brain and kokotxas omelette
It is easy to eat well in Madrid, but what is traditional gastronomy if it exists? It certainly is the offal (poor man's kitchen), the chickens during San Lorenzo or the Virgen de la Paloma, but also viscera, snouts, brains, ears and pork skin, lamb offal (lung and liver) , Madrid-style tripe, trotters or garlic gizzards. Head and heart.
Few taverns have understood this new Madrid as well as ** La Tasquería ** by Javi Estévez _(Calle Duque de Sesto, 48) _ or ** La Taberna de La Elisa ** by Javier Goya, Javier Mayor and David Alfonso (Tricycle), a Castilian kitchen house from 1907 recovered for El Barrio de las Letras _(Santa María Street, 42) _.
A classic? Chicken Fry in Ambassadors _(number 84) _. By the way, the tripes at the ** Vinoteca de los Hermanos García de la Navarra ** in Montalbán _(number 3) _ drive me crazy. And the walk afterward after El Prado, too.
This is what a recovered Castilian kitchen house from 1907 looks like
Doña Julia's fabada in Asturians _(calle de Vallehermoso, 94) _, the squid from ** El Pescador ** _(calle de José Ortega y Gasset, 75) _, the manzanilla pastries in the venice _(Calle Echegaray, 7) _ and so many fishmongers in this port of dry Spain: "The fishmongers of Madrid in summer are Castilla's nostalgia for the sea" , González Ruano wrote on a table at Café Teide.
Madrid is the Botillería and Fogón de Sacha —Sacha or barbarism— _(Juan Hurtado de Mendoza Street, 11) _; salad with ventresca and caviar from the Tasquita in front _(Ballesta street, 6) _; the hunt for Iñaki Camba in ** Arce ** _(Augusto Figueroa Street, 32) _; the fabulous skate with black butter at ** La Buena Vida ** _(Calle Conde de Xiquena, 8) _ or the marinated Iberian pork at the ** Taberna Verdejo ** at Marian y Carmen _(Calle de Espartinas, 6 ) _.
Madrid is his legacy and his memory. And it is that few cities have understood as well as the Forum that we are what precedes us , if we are not more than pieces of what we were.
For this reason, they fill to the brim (every day) Víctor and Ángeles ** Membibre ** in Chamberí _(Calle Guzmán El Bueno, 40) _, because they know they don't have to invent the wheel: just feed well.
A bit like that Commercial Café that has returned to the Bilbao roundabout the mid-morning coffees and torreznos with a flat of grenache; tell the present by understanding the past.
It is the story of pepe rock , chef of the restaurant, "the authentic Madrid that reminds me of my childhood is the one you found in any neighborhood bar any day ; on weekends your parents drank beers and we drank soft drinks, and you stood on tiptoe to reach with the toothpick and snack on anchovies in vinegar, croquettes or the squid sandwich cut into three parts...
Now, at the Café Comercial, we seek to reach the diner with the flavors of our Madrid gastronomy from before and with a renewed staging but faithful to the origin of honest and sincere cuisine”.
Madrid is its gastronomy, its tapas and its beers but in reality it is more than all that, because it is also its heat, its excesses and its infinite predisposition to racket. Madrid has not passed, Madrid is passing.
At the bar of the Commercial Cafe