Tapas, Tapas, Tapas

So you didn't think I'd end my posts on Seville and Andalucia without talking about the food, did you? That was half (maybe more than half) the reason most of us ended up deciding to go there anyway, so it was a major part of our enjoyment of our week there. Andalucía is at the heart of the tapas culture in Spain, and we focused a lot of our time and energy on finding some great food - not that it was too hard.

A lot of the tapas bars are just that: bars. You order your food and drinks at the bar and stand there and eat it, or take it to a barrel or small table in the back, coming back when you're ready for more. The story goes that tapas evolved from free snacks at bars. Tapas actually means lids; supposedly back in the day, bartenders would cover drinks with a small plate to keep bugs out. Soon they started putting little snacks on the plate, and these snacks grew more elaborate until they developed into tapas: bite-sized little dishes that let you try ten different tastes rather than just order one large main dish. Who knows if that story is actually true, but it sounds good.

The beauty of tapas, then, is that you can try so many different things, especially when you are sharing with a couple of friends. In Andalucía each dish is often under 2 or 3 euros - sometimes even under 1 euro. Several times we had a full meal of delicious food accompanied by wine, beer, or sherry, and still came in under 6 euros a head. When we were trying to be cheap and buy food from the grocery store, we still ended up almost paying the same amount.

And so we made it our mission to try out as many tapas bars as we could while in Seville. The first evening we got there, we headed to El Rinconcillo, which was founded in the 1600's and was therefore the oldest tapas bar in town. It was a dark-looking place with an old wood smell. There were tables in the back, but the tapas were at the bar. We hovered at the bar (no stools), and as we ordered the bartender chalked up the price of each dish on the bar in front of us. He saw Carey's rugby shirt and joked that I was too small, so I must be the little fast one that runs with the ball, while she must be the big one who hits people. I explained that it was actually the opposite, so he took it upon himself to make sure I was extra well-fed that night. I got some free meat out of the deal, so I wasn't complaining. This was also the first place that we saw the hanging ham legs that were standard decor for these kinds of bars. There was a row of them suspended from the cieling above the bar, looking almost fake. We were convinced, though, when we saw an employee pull one down and start carving us off slices.

There was another well-reputed tapas bar about a block away from our hostel. It was called Los Coloniales, and it was incredibly popular. We tried going there once with the whole team, but there was no way we would get in. When we came back with just three people, there was a two-hour wait for an outside table, and the bar was full. We went for a table in the back, but apparently the reason they were empty is because you get awful service back there. We had a waiter, but he didn't seem particularly inclined to serving us anything (except the bill), so even though the food was pretty good, the place just didn't have the charm of some of the others. We had better luck at another sit-down place that caters more toward the student crowd, Bar Levies. Their big pitchers of sangria probably helped our opinion of them, though. But we really liked the more traditional bar atmosphere that we had found at El Rinconcillo, so we tried to find more places like it. One place that fit the bill was Bar Alfalfa, where we got a small barrel table by the bar and had some of the best, cheapest tapas that we'd had all trip. It was another cramped place, centered around the bar, and filled with locals all drinking, smoking, and getting their nightly tapas dose.

So all of the bars were different, but we found some pretty standard dishes and ingredients that kept popping up. The big one, the main attraction, was ham. I'd say about 90% of the time I didn't recognize a dish name and asked about it, it turns out it had some sort of pork/ham in it. The prized stuff was the jamon iberico, from the local black pigs, best if fed on acorns. There were probably hundreds (if not thousands) of ways that pork was prepared, but one of my favorites was the solomillo al whisky: pork sirloin marinated in whisky sauce. Cheese and bread were other big staples; there was a huge variety of cheeses (including some local ones and a couple of different kinds of goat cheese), and bread was handy in soaking up extra sauce. One of the best kinds of sauces we found was called salmorejo: it's a mix of tomatoes, garlic, lemon, vinegar, and olive oil.

Being on the Mediterranean, seafood was also big on the menu, although I'm really not good at the Spanish names for different kinds of fish so I usually just was able to understand that it was some kind of fish and leave it at that. I did finally learn the different names for anchovies after mistakenly ordering them twice; it seems like if they are cooked they are called anchoas, if they are raw they are listed as boquerones. Tricky, tricky.

Fruits and vegetables were in short supply at tapas places, so much so that Katy once ordered a dish merely for the garnish side salad. But the dishes we did find were really good: the most notable were the chickpeas and spinach in a delicious spiced up sauce that we had at El Rinconcillo the first night. Other non-meat staples included the variety of tortillas (omelettes), most notably the tortilla espanola. It's a potato omelette, but most places we went served it cold and formed into a shape like a slice of pie. We first had it at for lunch in Cordoba, served in a cramped little bar across from the Mezquita.

To accompany all of this amazing food was beer, sangria, wine, or sherry. The popular local beer was Cruzcampo, which was on tap virtually everywhere. Sherry was also locally produced, and you had the option of fino ("fine" - the light version) and oloroso ("smelly" - the red version). Both were pretty dry to my taste, although the oloroso much less so. There was also a pretty big variety of local wines, most of which you could get a glass of for well under a euro.

I think I should stop now, because my mouth is watering just remembering all of this...

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