An old flame
Peter Grogan
Spain is my old girlfriend. I know her to be jealous of my new inamorata — La Bellissima Italia — but I thought I’d look the old girl up anyway as I was in the area. We were together for ten years but I wasn’t sure it was her at first sight. Sadly, the billions in EU-funded cream cakes she’s snarfed over the years have not entirely improved her shape. Rather the opposite, in fact, as she seems grumpy and self-absorbed — a confusion of borrowed values and meretricious aspirations. Twenty-five years ago, when I first knew her, she was much happier in her own skin — she didn’t have a pot to piss in but she’d dance and sing until dawn.
One of our favourite stamping-grounds was always San Sebastian, pearl of the elegant resorts strung along the coast of the Basque country. It’s like a nice version of Brighton so it always struck me as odd that such a relaxed and carefree place should have the name of a martyr best remembered for being used for target practice by the archers of the Roman emperor Diocletian.
The great sweep of sandy horseshoe bay
Delam
runs out at its eastern end into the compact Old Town and its narrow streets-of-a-thousand-bars. (The central point is the pleasing Plaza Nueva which is where, I remembered with a start, the Señorita and I agreed the parting of our ways one rainy night, although there’s no plaque or other memorial as far as I could see.) It was still raining as we arrived — or had it stopped between-times? — so the town’s other great attraction, alongside the pleasures of sand and splashing about, had to shoulder the burden of all our expectations. Donostia (as the Basques know it) and environs twinkle with more Michelin stardust (per head, as it were) than anywhere — I counted 15 — and there’s a fierce local pride in the gastronomía Vasca to match them.
The counters in all those bars are covered from end to end with trays piled high with tapas of a hundred types and there’s a neighbourly rivalry to produce ever more elaborate assemblies. For my tastes a lot of the laid-out stuff is a bit too crazy-mayonnaisey so it’s the cooked-to-order treats on the blackboard I’m after.
I’ve never known why gratinéed creamy mussels on the half-shell are called tigres, but as long as I can remember the name I’m not that bothered. The ones at the joyful Ganbara are particularly good. So are their salty grilled pinkie-sized green pimientos de Padron. Their red cousins — piquant little pimientos del piquillo — are not to be neglected either, especially when they’re stuffed with a silky mix of mashed salt-cod and potato.
The riotous presence of our seven-yearold twin boys (‘Dad? Is nuggettos Spanish for nuggets?’ Ben wants to know), along with the absence of said nuggettos from their menus, makes me fret at the formality of multistarred Michelin spots. Up in the improbable surroundings of the Miramón Science Park, the amiable Joxe Mari Arbelaitz’s eponymous restaurant solves the problem with easy charm, a single star and a café-style area adjoining the main dining-room if there’s an excess of seven-ness.
Back in the old days, the abbandonata and I didn’t have the wherewithal, but the €150odd bill in the restaurant proper seems a bargain now, accounting as it does for seared lobster in a puddle of prawn fumée, fabulous local foie gras and the feenest of tartes fines. I use the French names (be grateful — some of the natives think a poached egg is a galdarraztatutako arrautzarekin) but there’s plenty of local flavour in the cooking and the raciest of Rieslings from Torres is daddy’s little helper for the afternoon.
Nothing could be more local than tortilla española but at the up-and-coming Bodegón Alejandro the poached quail’s eggs perched atop a layered potato cake marooned in a pool of garlicky spring-onion juice is cooked sous-vide (you know, 64°C for 37 minutes, that sort of thing). The old girlfriend probably wouldn’t recognise it despite the chef’s assurance that it’s really the same thing, just de otra manera. He’s got a Bib Gourmand from the Mich — sort of a probationer for a star — so he must know and, in any case, it’s much more delicious than a greying omelette. The views from the top of the hills that crown each end of the bay — one has a mini Rio-style Christ — are quite spectacular (or in this case, would have been if visibility had been more than about 50 feet). So best to tarry in the bars and see if the old girl can, after all, still shake a leg.
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