Oil and Grease in Madrid

I'd heard before that food in Spain wasn't particularly good, which was always hard to imagine considering the good climate and all the fruits and vegetables that grow there. When I had the chance to finally visit Spain (Madrid) while on a business trip, I decided to arrive a few days in advance to be able to explore Madrid and also see whether the food really was as greasy as people had told me. 

The first evening I met up with a coworker who also arrived in advance and we went for tapas as it was 8pm and we were hungry, but couldn't go to a restaurant because they don't open till 9:30 or 10pm. We walked around Sol station and ended up at La Catedral where we  tried paquetitos crujientes de ternera y queso azul (crunchy parcels of veal and blue cheese) and croquetas de queso manchego e ibérico (manchego-a sheep cheese-and Iberian ham croquettes). All fried and served with, ta-da-daaaa...fried potatoes in the form of potato chips! Of course things that are fried are tasty, but it's not something I would want to eat on a regular basis. Fortunately drinking beer with tapas does help "dissolve" the grease and creates an appetite for more grease! I don't know how the Madrileños do it: staying up late eating greasy foods and drinking alcohol but going to work pretty much at the same time we do in Switzerland.

The next morning I headed to Chocolatería San Ginés, which is probably the most famous churros café in Madrid. Churros are fried pieces of dough, which are often dipped in hot chocolate. Now, before I went to this place I was picturing churros similar to the ones I knew from my childhood in California when we used to buy them from a cart while visiting the Los Angeles Zoo. Those churros were long fried dough sticks covered in cinnamon and sugar. Unfortunately that is not at all what I got in Madrid. What I got were several thin sticks of fried dough pretty much without flavor and without sweetness (sorry, I need sugar) which oozed grease when bitten into and the chocolate served along with it is not even close to any chocolate I'm used to as a German national and Swiss resident (and food snob). It was a huge disappointment. It'd be interesting, though, to find out if I still liked the churros at the LA zoo or whether it's some precious childhood memory of mine that would burst like a bubble if I ventured there again.

On the first night all my coworkers were in Madrid we went to Cervecería Santa Ana where we got several different tapas, my favorite of which were Jabugo ham and manchego cheese. After tapas and beer we continued to the restaurant Medina Mayrit that serves food with, as their website says, Muslim, Jewish and Christian influences. The dinner was outstanding (except for the dessert--unfortunately a common thing in Spain). We first got a cold roasted tomato soup followed by a salad of frisee lettuce, tomatoes, walnuts and pomegranate seeds with a honey dressing (or so it tasted) and meat croquettes. For dinner we could choose between a few mains. I decided on chicken tagine stewed with almonds, prunes and apricots. Dessert was a white chocolate mousse, but it was not very good as it had no flavor and I suspect it was made with gelatin, so it had more of a jell-o than mousse-texture. 

The other restaurants we went to while in Madrid aren't really worth mentioning. But I do think that there must be some hidden gems somewhere. Better luck next time!