Cooked

Not always easy to find your way around for a hungry layman, lost in the jungle of bodegas, tascas, tabernas, tapas bars, marisquerías, pulperías, mesones and other restaurants. And what about mealtimes (we eat about 2 hours later than in France, for lunch and dinner!) and this wide variety of dishes …? You have to be tempted, dare to dive into the crowd in search of the counter and its eternal jamones (hams), choose a dish without necessarily understanding what is in it … It is by tasting that you become connoisseur!

In Spain, there are fewer “restaurants” as we know them in the rest of Europe. On the other hand, most bars and cafes offer something to eat.
You can, depending on the size of your appetite or simply to taste several specialties, order una tapa (a small portion), una ración (a whole plate) or una media ración (half a plate). The clientele usually stays standing at the counter, but many establishments combine the tapas bar with a few taberna- style tables and a more chic separate restaurant room. There is something for everyone and for all budgets.

Most offer midday menus at low prices, such as 10-12 €, including starter, main course, bread, and drink, sometimes even a dessert … This is the menú del día.
As for fruit lovers, you will be quicker to go to the supermarket than to look for a fresh and sweet touch on the menu!
Also be careful not to get tangled up: if the bocadillo is a “sandwich”, sandwich (in Spanish) means a “toast” or a “croque-monsieur”, while the tostada is a “slice of toasted sandwich bread ”

Spanish culinary specialties

– Paella: rice base cooked in oil at the same time as the chicken, lean pork with ham, langoustines, peas, garlic, onions, spices and saffron. The paella is of Valencian origin. The fishermen added the ingredients found on site to the rice: eel, rabbit, green beans, peas, artichokes from the huertas (vegetable gardens), etc., as well as the saffron, which gives the paella its yellow color. Given its price, saffron is very often replaced by turmeric or a food coloring.
In the open air, in a large frying pan placed on a tripod, it should be cooked slowly.
– The gazpacho: cold Andalusian soup, made with raw vegetables: tomatoes, peppers, onions, cucumbers, garlic, olive oil, vinegar and hard bread.
– Tortilla: omelet served cold or hot, most often with potatoes (patatas), or even with fine herbs, crayfish tails, chorizo or even with tomatoes, bacon, peas, etc.
– Cocido: a sort of stew with more or less variations, served as a main course and very invigorating. Usually served as a daily specialty in some restaurants once a week.

– On the sweet side, the churros, these fried pancake sticks, inherited from the Arab influence, the porras (large churros) and the buñuelos (donuts) to dip at teatime in the traditional thick hot chocolate.

Other delicacies, most often based on milk and eggs, leche frita , a kind of sweet and thick béchamel, cooled and then cut into large squares fried in oil then sprinkled with sugar, the tocino de cielo (hair cake ), the natillas , thick custard flavored with cinnamon or lemon, the arroz con leche (rice pudding), the torrijas, the equivalent of our French toast.

Where to eat in Spain?
– Tasca: bistro, tapas bar, where one nibbles rather leaning on the counter.
– Cervecería: “brasserie” in the literal sense, therefore beer bar.
– Bodega: “wine cellar”, in practice a sort of wine bar.
– Taberna: “tavern”.

More info on tapas
Taste tapas in Spain

“Restaurants”
Among the restaurants, there are also:

– Mesón: fairly inexpensive restaurant preparing typical cuisine. A sort of canteen, what!
– Comedor: dining room in a hotel establishment or in a bar.
– Marisquería: fish and seafood restaurant (mariscos = seafood).
– Restaurante: this is the closest thing to the classic restaurant, that is to say a place where you sit down to eat, even if you often find, except when the address is really opulent, a tapas counter in the next room.

Drinks
With alcohol
– Beer (cerveza): the most common drink! To avoid disappointment, know that in a bar, una cerveza is more like a bottled beer, the pressure being called una caña (ask for a quinto for a 20 cl, una mediana for a 33 cl and una jarra for a 50 cl) . The cooler says una clara.

– Wine:
Central Spain produces good regional wines, known and less known. Among the most famous, those of Rioja , as famous in Spain as our bordeaux, and of Castile-Leon (Ribera del Duero, Rueda, Tierra de León), without forgetting the Somontano wines in the surroundings of Huesca, in Aragon , and those of the Channel which offer a good average.
The birthplace of Catalan viticulture is located a few kilometers from Barcelona, in the Penedès region. With traditional grape varieties (garnatxa, carinyena, ull de llebre, among others, for red wines; macabeu, xarello, parelladafor the whites) European grape varieties are now mixed: cabernet-sauvignon, riesling, chardonnay, gewurztraminer. The result is a wide variety of vintages.
In Extremadura, we often find vino de pitarra, a young artisanal wine, not bad and cheap, but its accelerated fermentation in about twenty days does not always work for sensitive stomachs.
The Galicia produces very good regional wines, including whites. There are several denominations of origin, the best known of which is Rías Baixas.

– Vermuth al grifo: literally, “vermouth on tap”. It is cooked wine macerated with herbs and delivered in small barrels with sparkling water. We pull it a bit like draft beer. It’s light, refreshing, sparkling, and has nothing to do with bottled vermouths. To consume with a lot of tapas, because it goes very quickly to the head!
Also, very common, sherry, a cooked wine, is served in all Spanish bars.

Alcohol-free
– The horchata (or orxata), which is wrongly translated as “orgeat”, is as good as it is refreshing.

– Granisat (or granizado in Castilian) is the local version of the famous Italian granita, made here from lemon, orange or coffee juice, mixed with crushed ice in large centrifuges. Sweet, refreshing and inexpensive.

– Coffee, generally good, is for all breakfasts. The Spanish particularly like it with milk (café con leche), added hot in bars. If you want it black, ask for a solo coffee – or a cortado if you prefer it just with a touch of leche. An elongated man calls himself largo coffee. And then: helado coffee (iced) or café con hielo (served hot but with a glass full of ice cubes: it’s up to you to make the mixture for a smoothie).

– Another essential Spanish since the discovery of the Americas, hot chocolate does not look like ours. Here, it is a rich and nourishing drink, thick, dense in aromas, made expressly to soak the famous churros, these long donuts for breakfast.

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