Pining for Spain

Rather than dwell on Saturday night's catastrophe (no pun intended - ok, pun intended) I prefer to dwell on the delight of finding a U.S. tapas bar that lives up to its name. I've been to many an American restaurant that claims to serve Spanish tapas, but really they're just capitalizing on the fact that while many Americans don't have a clue about what goes on beyond our borders, they will happily jump on any yuppie bandwagon that co-opts some "quaint" custom from abroad and call it their latest discovery. What you get at these places is a selection of sculpted, overpriced appetizers that you're supposed to order as if they were dim sum (drinks sold separately) so you end up paying twice as much as if you had just ordered the dang things as appetizers.

Real tapas, my friends, are tasty little morsels that come free with your beer at many bars in Spain. Some bars may charge you, but only a pittance, as the idea is to put a little buffer in the belly between you and inebriation. The best place for tapas, in my mind, is Granada, where there is a strip of bars that appear like Brigadoon only when I have given up trying to find them among the windy, cobblestone streets of the old part of town. Here you will find that each bar has it's own specialty of the house - like the tenderest piece of grilled squid prepared to order, or crisp and gooey cheese croquette, or a smokey slice of prosciutto served on a slab of chewy peasant bread (I was not a vegetarian when I lived in Spain) - and what you do is hop from one bar to the next, ordering a small beer at each so you can sample what each establishment has to offer, until your belly is full and/or you're no longer coherent enough to order the next beer.

And that brings me back to Cafe Pastiche. Granted, the tapas did not come free with a beer, (in fact they sold fairly pricey bottles of wine,) and the morsels had a bit of a nouveau cuisine air about them, (mushroom flan, anyone? How about a blue cheese truffle?) but the casual atmosphere was just right, and at one to two bucks a pop for each tasty treat, our meal was reasonably priced. (Forty bucks for the two point five of us, but that included an eight dollar bottle of wine.) Ok, so now that I'm writing about it, I get that Cafe Pastiche is only a distant relative of the tapas bars in Granada, so what was it that made me pine for Spain? Was it that they had ham and cheese croquettes along with the chick pea salad and roasted red pepper torte? That could have been it. Or maybe it was just the sitting at the bar sipping an alcoholic beverage, I felt more relaxed than I had in days.

The thing about Spain, and Southern Spain in particular, is they really know how simply to be. It's not just the institutionalized nap time; it's the holistic lack of urgency - the expectation that if you want something done after 3 p.m. on Friday, you're going to have to wait until Monday, and if you show up 40 minutes late for something you're right on time. I'm pretty sure the world would be a much better place if we could all just take a siesta.