Fine and Unfine Dining in Galicia
My brother Jari has become absolutely cuckoo about surfing. It was originally just a perk about living in a beach town – learn to splash around in a more advanced capacity – but he’s really taken to it and it’s become a real passion of his. Portugal is renowned among surfers for having some of the largest (and, crucially, most predictable) waves in the world, like the 50 ft monsters at Nazare. Both of us had easy access to sledding growing up in Alaska, and this is functionally the same thing. People sit on top of planks of wood or plastic and slide around on water. In sledding, the water happens to be frozen and gravity is the force driving you forwards; in surf, the water is very wet and the weather is a lot better. This is the stupidest possible way I could have described surfing, and possibly the stupidest series of sentences I have ever written, and I have done so this way on purpose to annoy Jari.
Anyways. We took a weeklong trip up the coast so I could try out surfing and so we could explore Galicia, the lush and mostly-forgotten-about part of northern Spain hovering above Portugal. Surfing is cool and fun and while I did not manage to stand up on the board, I had a few magical moments where I did actually catch a wave and zoom forward in a way that defies one’s own intuition about how waves work. It was extremely good. And we got to go to a bunch of gorgeous, mostly-deserted beaches on the Atlantic coast.
In between stops on the surf trip, we ate some good food and some bad food. Here is a list ranking these foods.
Swordfish carpaccio at Vino Vero
Jari and I were in a natural wine bar in Lisbon. It was late and we’d been driving all day, and had barely enough go in us to make it past 10pm. It looked good on the menu. When it arrived, it looked good on the plate. It had clearly just been taken out of the freezer and sliced, which is odd for something called “carpaccio” – normally thin slices of raw beef with stuff on it – but makes sense for something that’s fundamentally sashimi. It was whitish slices of icy fish, decorated with orange blobs of chutney, mandarin slices, and chopped chives.
The taste exactly resembled deli lunch meat. Specifically turkey breast. With mango chutney and mandarin orange and chives. It was a little bit like eating the deconstructed contents of a school lunch box; namely, bad. I had to consciously remind myself as I was chewing the ice crystals: this is not frozen turkey meat, this is swordfish. Didn’t help much.
The wine was also bad. Natural wine can sometimes be really interesting, but often I feel it’s made the same turn that craft brewing did 20 years ago: “what if we made this taste as much like ass as possible and convinced everyone that was good?”
Ok, this isn’t entirely fair. Lots of natural wine is great. But it certainly amplifies the funk factor way beyond what you’d expect in a glass of wine, just to remind you, oh yeah, this stuff is fermented. The best of it introduces all sorts of interesting new flavors to the palate, and I have had many fun nights out in portugal drinking scrumptious natural wine. The worst of it however uses the “natural wine” branding to mask the fact that it smells bad and tastes bad. Jari and I, from our stints living in Georgia, got the full extent of this. Yes, it’s an ancient wine-making tradition, and plenty of people still make it at home. Some of it is phenomenal. Most is not. Much is bad in unique undrinkable ways.
In Turkey, a bad wine is called kopek olduren. Dog-killer.
Rating: Two out of ten swordfish
Pork with clams in the Alantejo cultural center
In Lisbon, Jari’s friend and colleague Zach took us out to an Alantejo cultural centre/regional restaurant in an old Moorish mansion – big courtyard with a fountain in the middle, lush hanging plants, etc – but since its reconquista a number of florid murals and other decorations had been added. The Arabic names of god were still there on the tiling in the stairwell. Truly amazing building.
Zach is from Alaska, which would have been unique enough, but he is also an orchestral musician from Alaska, meaning the population of orchestral musicians from alaska in portugal is two. (Three, if mom is there as well.)
We got a dish that Dad’s made for us before, which is pork marinated in garlic and wine, sauteed in olive oil, and then you put a bunch of clams on top and steam them all in white wine. Fun fact: the name for vindaloo curry comes from this exact portuguese marinade, back from when Portugal occupied Goa. Vinha d’alho. Wine and garlic. (Am I going to end each of these episodes with a language fact? Probably. This is my blog and you know what I’m like.)
Rating: 10 Pork out of 10 Clams!!!!
Gourmet Burgers in Vianha do Castelho
Last year my friend Matt Smith got married in Gijon, Spain, where his wife is from. Gijon is in the tiny northern coastal region of Asturias, where they speak something that’s almost Spanish, in the same way that I can almost understand people from the Dominican Republic or Argentina. Everyone recommended we go to this one place for burgers. They really pushed that we order the burgers undercooked, because to appreciate it like a fine steak, you had to have the middle part pink.* Anyways. We got the bugers cooked ‘a punto’, to the touch, which apparently meant applying the burger to the grill for ten seconds on each side. The burger itself was also twice the size of a normal burger, which means the insides were mostly raw and only slightly warmed. It was gross. This was the highest rated place in the town.
I put this up to popular city trends winding their ways into regional centers where locals, without any novelty in their lives, experience it as a revelation. Here in London, I have been subjected to many undercooked “gourmet” burgers, and have learned to instruct chefs to please cook the food before serving it to me.
While traveling through northern Portugal, we stopped at a port bar and got small glasses of the greatest port I’ve ever had, and then got smash burgers at the local brewery. They were pretty good. I got something with a grilled green pepper on it. I cannot truly remember the burger to give you a proper review, because we were seated next to and chatting with a guy who, it became apparent as we chatted, was a fascist. We were watching the Georgia-Portugal match of the euros in the bar, and we explaining to the guy that both of us had lived in Georgia for a spell. He launched on an unprompted rant about the evils of Stalin, and then went outside to smoke.
I switched to Turkish so we wouldn’t be overheard, and told Jari that the guy was likely a fascist. Why’s that, he asked. Lots of people are interested in world war two, I said, but there are only two kinds of people who want to relitigate who were the bad guys and good guys. The first kind thinks the Soviet Union didn’t get enough credit for defeating Hitler – those people are, reliably, diehard communists. This guy on the other hand was saying that the USSR was “an empire of fear” and Stalin** was “the worst dictator ever”, placing himself squarely in the latter category.
As the night wore on, we heard many of his other unusual opinions, like his disdain for the EU as an institution, and his suggestion that Portugal should have been annexed by the US and become a sort of maritime colony. He was good conversation: we talked about writing, economics, life in the city. He had played a lot of football, and was able to provide illuminating commentary, which was nice because I don’t understand football at all.
Language fun fact: during the dog walk we met some Galician hippies. Galician – Galego – is a “dialect” that’s precisely the midpoint between Spanish and Portuguese. Everyone spoke in their own way and we all understood each other. Their dog’s name was puxo, which they said means “hat” in Galego.
Later on in the evening, we went on a dog walk with him around the town, and he said something about Mexicans replacing Americans by having too many babies. That was the end of the dog walk. “Turns out you were right!” Jari said.
Raing: One out of two World Wars
The best mussels you'll get outside of Alaska
Tequeños at Miss Vaca 2024
In A Coruna, the surfing was not gonna happen, but we did find a tapas place called “Tequeño” and their specialty was “The Tequeño.” It is a hot dog or a mozzarella cheese stick wrapped in whatever the spanish equivalent of canned pillsbury pastry dough is. It was hot on the outside and cool-to-cold in the middle. We were unsure whether this was carelessness or the preferred way of serving it. It was: fine. Tasted like a state fair pretzel. (We got a tequeño elsewhere and it was identical.)
On TV was the annual Miss Vaca competition. The logo was a repurposed RuPaul’s Drag Show but with a skinny cow in a dress. Each of the cows appeared onscreen with their vital statistics and astrological signs. (This is not a joke.) Four women, the avatars for the cows I suppose, sang a regional song,
Later we went to an underground gay bar called “the whorehouse” and had about the best dance night that’s possible to have in A Coruna. “Everyone in the city comes here after 1am,” someone at the bar told us. He also told us it’s unlisted on Google maps so that tourists can’t find it. This is not true.
Two guys were standing outside the bar all night. They weren’t really acting as bouncers, so we were unsure of what their job was. When we came outside to get some air and I was, as usual, talking too loudly, they shushed us multiple times.
“They are professional shushers,” Jari suggested.
Rating: Four out of four galician cows
Oven bake pizza in the Caldaria de Lobios
The fascist recommended we check out a hotspring in the Galician mountains. It wasn’t too far out of the way, so we took his advice. Along the way we stopped at a sunken roman fort, which, in a true rural Europe style, had nobody preventing us from clambering all over millenia-old sunken foundations.
Caldaria de Lobios was truly a locals-only sort of place. The old, the young, the bored tourists alike all gathered in the stone pool in the shade of an abandoned spa by the mountain stream. We sat in the steaming sulfurous water until it got too hot to bear, and then wobbled down the slope to the river to cool off.
We stayed at the (only) hostel. It would be a long day of driving the following day and we wanted to take it easy for our last day of vacation. There was a single restaurant with very haunted vibes down the road, which I vetoed. Instead, we tried the local bar, which had oven bake pizza.
We watched the Spain-Georgia game with the old men of the town, who kept looking at me, annoyed, because I was again making too much noise. But they were also making noise. I guess apparently I had missed the unwritten rule, which is that only they are a allowed to talk.
At the end of the match, one of the louder guys looked at the other guys and smiled. A thought had happened to him. “Who do you think is a better player? Messi or Ronaldo?”
Jari turned to me. “This is the stupidest conversation on earth and we need to leave immediately.” I agreed. It was really stupid. We left.
Rating: Ronaldo is better than Messi
Chips and Dip at Jari’s house
We drove for eight hours from the hotsprings all the way to Jari’s house. We invited everyone over for a "BBQ". We did not cook anything. We were very uninterested in cooking. We had chips and dip.
Rating: 10/10
*Jari’s friend Brian explained on our last day that the smashburger trend is the new thing, and I’ve had a few of those too – they’re meant to be a reaction to the “gourmet-ification” of these plump unappetizing tartare objects between fancy buns, and a return to working-class fast food. The meat is rolled into a ball and then pressed onto the griddle with a squashy iron weight. It is a vastly superior trend.
**It should be noted here that undercooked ground meat carries a high risk for salmonella, more so than your rare steak - the stuff on the inside of the meat has been sliced up and exposed to the air, which means microorganisms can grow all over it. A rare steak is fine, because the insides are sealed to the air, and the outsides have hopefully been cooked on a screaming hot pan. Yes, I am aware that steak tartare is a thing, but good steak tartare is less likely to be bad for you because it’s minced by hand. Burgers are simply pushed through the meat grinder, which, unless regularly cleaned, can accumulate bacteria pretty fast. Some Germans eat raw ground pork for breakfast, which is gross, and Germany needs to be stopped.
***One of the people stopping Germany.