DESPENSA / LARDER
write ingredients you have at home and look for a recipe
I come here mainly because of the deer. The other tapas are also very good, but the best one, without a doubt, is the deer in sauce. For this occasion, my partner in dinner was Alex Arenas Azorín, and we ordered “Migas” (breadcrumbs fried in olive oil with pork and red and green pepper), potatoes with garlic and paprika, croquettes with ham, and, of course, the deer in sauce.
Our drinks were Paulaner Hefe-Weissbier and mineral water, plus two shots of acorn liquor, compliment of the house.
The price of this dinner was 43 €.
Taberna de Conspiradores is in C/ Moratín 33, Madrid.
I’ve liked Clarita (Corredera Baja de San Pablo 19, Madrid) since the very first time I ate at it. I’ve been back a few times and never been disappointed. The decoration of the place is elegant and cozy, the staff is very attentive and the food is good, very good.
A little hors d’oeuvre helped us going through the waiting for our food. The restaurant offered us chickpeas purée and zucchini cream, with delicious homemade breads.
We ordered quail salad that was ok, salmon tartar that was very good and goat cheese & aubergines millefeuilles that were absolutely amazing.
Our wine choice was a verdejo from Protos.
The desserts menu is more than tempting, but as we were approaching full we decided to order just one and share it. We had crêpe with apple & ice cream, so tasty! Also lemoncello and herbs orujo, plus Absolut vodka with diet coke for me.
The price of this dinner was around 50 €.
London born illustrator Jessica Boston is based in Barcelona, Spain. Skillfully blending humour and reality, she creates striking, intense drawings by re-interpreting found amateur photographs. The use of complicated angles, vibrant colour and confusing compositions create accidental inaccuracies, which in turn, allow a great deal of wittiness to shine through each image. Maintaining the truth of the original image is important to her and the use of strong line and simple materials reflect this. Evoking surprise, joy and scandalous debauchery – her drawings both reveal and question the hidden dynamics of an increasingly visual everyday world. Have a look at www.jessicaboston.com
The following illustrations have been made specially for ñam ñam!
Brains, intestines, hearts, veins, assorted muscles, unusual wedding cakes, a butcher’s shop called “La Carnicería Love” and a pair of disturbing siamese ladies with a soft spot for “sweet” men, ouch!
Rosalía Banet’s work has been exhibited everywhere: ARCO, Frieze, Artisima, Art Chicago, Voltes, etc. You can have a look at it here: Rosalía Banet
Marta Hurtado de Mendoza is the Editor in-chief of Vanidad magazine, and she knows how to enjoy food: not only from a good restaurant but also from her favourite fast-food chains. During her last stay in New York, she visited a few restaurants and food shops and now she tells us about it. Pay attention, not all of them are advisable.
Così. This is the first place where we had breakfast in NYC. Così is a chain, now we regret choosing it, but it was our first day, and we were disorientated and very hungry. Here I had a rectangular bagel stuffed with an extra dense 3-eggs-omelette, bacon and cheddar. The triangular sweet is a raisins scone, and in the plastic glass there’s a fruit salad absolutely tasteless but so colourful that it made me think I was eating something healthy, while I was munching my 3-eggs-omelette with bacon.
www.getcosi.com
Guy & Gallard. It is also a chain, but it has nothing to do with the previous one. At least in the one where we had breakfast 10 days in a row, the service was very good, reading the breakfast menu was a totally enjoyable experience and during the rest of the day we were daydreaming about what were we going to order the next morning.
Breakfast, beyond the “Most Important Meal of the Day” motto, means the dreamt meal to me. It mixes sweet and savoury, and it is acceptable to eat considerable amounts of food. Restaurants should be serving it during the whole day. At Guy & Gallard we tasted many different things from its menu and the most remarkable of them were: french toast, pancakes with banana and the burrito breakfast.
French Toast is a marvellous thing: pancake meets toast meets “torrija” (Torrija is the most similar thing to French Toast that we have in Spain; it can be soaked in milk, wine, etc). It was sweetened with another amazing invention: the butterscotch sauce. Pancakes usually were served with maple syrup, that, in my opinion, doesn’t go well with them at all, so every time I was asking for pancakes with banana, I also had to ask for that delicious butterscotch sauce. And burrito breakfast… A fantastic crazy creation that featured the classic Mexican tortilla wrapping the classic American breakfast (scrambled eggs, bacon and cheddar) served with delicious red potatoes.
Guy & Gallard www.guyngallard.com
Balthazar is a beautiful, posh, mythical and out-of-date place with very attentive service. It has a very well-structured and useful system of menus and prices. For instance, beyond breakfast time there is a time slot till 5 p.m. with prices more or less restrained. Balthazar welcomes its customers with a fantastic assorted breads basket, with butter and salt, that helps you go through the waiting for your order. We asked for two sandwiches: the classic BLT (grilled chicken, bacon, lettuce and tomato) served with a delicious mustard sauce, and the roasted eggplant sandwich (with peperonata, arugala and shaved Parmesan on ciabatta).
Balthazar www.balthazarny.com
We had the Sunday brunch at Cafeteria, in Chelsea ( 119 Seventh Ave.). The typical modern, white, aseptic place with cool waiters and good looking people. Despite all these facts, that could make you feel terrified, the food was quite good. We asked for Benedict eggs (the menu offered to change the ham for salmon, but we opted for the classic version) and a huge omelette with bacon, caramelized onion and Jack cheese. We chose to drink the Inferno Bloody Mary. Inferno was a name that totally suited it; the tabasco must have been poured by some Satan employee and it also had a jalapeño as long as the glass, and I would swear there were some lost chillies as well. Its high content in vodka prevented us from taking more photos.
www.cafeteriagroup.com
One day we decided to have our Central Park picnic, and we chose for this experience some Dean & DeLuca food, that probably is a franchise of Heaven on Earth. Inside the shop we explored every corner, thinking about what menus would we prepare with all those amazing breads, cheeses, fruits and wines. It is quite pricey though… Finally we took a ciabatta, some assorted cheeses, grapes, figs bread, California rolls, macaroni with Parmesan, sun-dried tomatoes, spinach and pesto, and also thai chicken with vegetables, cheese snacks, melon and water.
www.deandeluca.com
Darío Adanti is from Buenos Aires but has been living in Madrid for a long time already. He is a brilliant cartoonist, illustrator, animator and scriptwriter and also is a lovely smiley guy with an excellent sense of humour. He has published his work here, there and everywhere: El País, La Vanguardia, El Mundo, Diario Público, Rolling Stone, etc. Also he has published 7 comic strips books and 3 books with a compilation of his illustrations. Have a look at www.darioadanti.com
