Hispania

Do you see the photographs on this page? Please close your eyes. Here, they make love in the dark, like they used to, traditional style, feeling pleasure with obvious embarrassment. Although to tell the truth, the admirable Pere Soley and I discovered gastronomical virginity during our last visit to this establishment owned by the Reixach sisters, Lolita and Paquita. Catalonia, Spain and the world should pay homage to them for being a great temple of origins, of traditions, of pure unadulterated pleasure…of a reality we all seek, feel, and appreciate, but is on the verge of extinction.

Before you is the most illustrious eating-house in the world. Wonderful ingredients—the finest available—and a method of preparation that, with neither art nor science, but rather simply with intuition, communicates a proverbial gift of taste, entices all palates, blurring the line between the human and the celestial. Thus was our last feast, a historic one in which we witnessed a procession of miraculous Montserrat tomatoes with Figueres onions and mongetes del ganxet (a type of white broad bean); it is impossible to equal such distinction with raw materials. The pa amb tomaquet (bread with tomato) made us truly feel our homeland for the fist time in our lives. The crisp, melt-in-your-mouth cocido croquettes are one of those unsolvable gastronomic mysteries. What do they put in there to bring us to give us such pleasure? The plate of cured meats—fuet, salami, butifarras, blood puddings, etc. --entail a plunge into the most primal and pleasurable meatiness and gourmandise imaginable. More mongetes, which in this establishment are uniquely refined and creamy (worthy of sharing the world’s number one ranking with the fabes (fava beans) at Casa Gerardo, in Prendes, Spain), which in this case came out in droves, in massive quantities, together with more butifarra, esparracada, a sausage sought by Americans to bestow it with the crown of gastronomy. At this point, we had to give the nod to Mediterranean delicacies: the most colossal of grilled scarlet prawns, grilled baby squid and grilled baby octopus. Blessed grill! Without science whatever, they embody incomparable delicacy. Seduced by Paquita, a real character, we discovered a chicken in escabeche (oil and vinegar marinade) that was really a cock with dark meat that tasted of glory, as well as spiced tripe, absolutely clean and not very gelatinous, that made us exclaim: God bless you!