I don’t know if I had the usual culinary epiphanies when I lived in France. I remember thinking it very strange that everybody bought UHT instead of fresh milk, and that I was eating all that cheese and losing weight like crazy. But then I’d spent most of my life in a French school, surrounded by French people. I suppose some of the strongest impressions didn’t make themselves felt till later: it wasn’t until I was back in the UK that it struck me how simply, honestly good everything had been–even the university cafeteria’s steak haché was served perfectly rare in the middle. And it wasn’t until I got to America, and noticed that pastry shops here bake like they’re on a ship, using only ingredients with pantry immortality and a colour palette of yellows and browns–flour, chocolate chips, shortening–that I understood what fabulous, fresh, artful things I’d been buying for 3 euros to have with my coffee.

Spain was another story. The impact of Spain was immediate. In Barcelona, my friend took me to Cerveceria El Vaso de Oro, a corridor of a place where the same man who is pouring your beer is also grilling your monkfish, on the same countertop; by my ninth or tenth Padrón pepper I was ready to jump over that countertop and apprentice myself to the bartender/poissonnier. I was convinced that I had nothing to lose in New York and everything to gain in that narrow kitchen, where everything comes out piping hot, glistening with olive oil and coated in more sea salt than is really good for you (unless you have my reptilian blood pressure and can more or less carry around a salt lick around with you in your handbag, with no ill effects.)

Last Friday night at Boqueria (which is named after the famous market in Barcelona), even my famously low blood pressure was put to the test. A dish of Padrón peppers came to the table covered in a mist of salt so thick it looked like grated Parmesan. The peppers were so salty that I dreamt all night I was perishing in the desert–I really was that parched–but I ended up forgiving the chef’s lunatic hand with the sea salt because the dish was a statistical marvel. Nine out of ten Padrón peppers look just like jalapeños but pack no heat at all, and the tenth is fiery (not at Scotch bonnet or bird’s eye levels, by any means, but still noticeably hot.) And in our dish of 30 peppers, the distribution of hot ones was indeed a perfect 1 in 10.

Eating out with my boyfriend has its pros and its cons. I couldn’t order txipirones (baby squid) because he won’t eat, as he puts it, “molluscs or arthropods”, but he did tell me that my Brussels sprouts (whose passing I obviously mourned too soon, earlier this week) were superior to the restaurant’s. They used chorizo where I use pancetta, a trick I might work into my repertoire, but I think they had the Padrón pepper guy adding the salt.

I liked the restaurant, overall. I liked the pintxos morunos, skewered bites of tender lamb with salsa verde, and I liked the bacon-wrapped dates stuffed with Cabrales (a very blue Spanish blue). I liked the Serrano ham on the garlic-rubbed pan con tomate, and I appreciated the variety on the cheese list even though I thought the portion of garrotxa was stingy as hell.

I was kind of mystified by something on the specials menu (a picture of the dish opens this post): an olive-oil “poached” egg on an asparagus puree with fava beans, and both fingerling and shoestring potatoes. This is just the sort of thing I crave and make for myself at home (although it’s more likely to be a puree of frozen peas than anything as fancy as this), so I was really excited to see it on a restaurant menu–it feels like such a personal dish, you know? Sadly, the egg didn’t seem to me so much poached as sunny-side up, and the sauce managed to be both a vibrant forest green and completely insipid (where is the salt lunatic when you need him?). I managed to overlook this one, though, because it came from a restaurant that serves hot food until past midnight, and cheese/charcuterie until 2am, with a wine list that makes me happy just to read.

I adore Spanish food but I think the country has a very weak pastry tradition. Spanish bread is kind of tragic, and everywhere you go it’s always flan, flan, crema catalana and more flan. (Unless you go to Espai Sucre, which I am starting to believe is an undercover plot by the EU dairy commission to keep the flan ubiquitous, by showing Spaniards just what can happen when you dare to think outside the flanero.) Boqueria offers churros with a little glass of dipping chocolate and a crema catalana that, on the night I was there, was too aggressively glazed and a little bit scrambled.

I say: go there, drink the verdejo, eat the classics, skip dessert–and tell me how the txipirones were.

Boqueria
53 W 19th St (betw. 5th and 6th Aves)
New York, NY 10011
(212) 727-1548

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