We are taking our usual long summer holiday this August and this time decided to head for Orgiva, in The Alpujarras in Southern Spain. The format of the holiday is to take a long drive and ferry trip. We are not keen on flying for various reasons, and Paul loves driving. So on the journey down we camped at various sites until reaching Orgiva after 6 days travelling. The journey also gave us an opportunity to visit some other great cities and regions of Spain.
Those of you who know me know that I love food. That is a big understatement but we’ll leave it at that for the moment! In fact really I prefer to cook than eat out, and fortunately Paul prefers my cooking to restaurant food. In the UK this is not only because of the quality but also the cost. So on holiday (as we are this year for 4 and a half weeks) we eat out more than we do in England for the rest of the year. When travelling this is inevitable; I do not actually cook when we are camping. What we did not have much of last time we were on holiday in Spain was tapas. We seemed to go to the wrong type of restaurants. And we were never offered free tapas with drinks. So on this holiday I have been delighted to encounter both free tapas and plenty to buy from menus.
I am not going to name this restaurant, but I shall just say that it is in Salamanca and was not a good experience. We arrived before 8:00pm and the dinner menu was not available until 8:30. So we decided to go for tapas, or rather raciones, which are bigger than tapas. We did get carried away and order 4 each, so 12 dishes for the 3 of us. Amongst those dishes were some repeats; Paul and Jess both chose Spanish Omlette, and Paul and I both opted for Patatas Bravas. For a start the portions were huge; I should maybe have looked more closely into exactly what a raciones is! It was not just that though. It was all so stodgy, with mainly carbohydrate-based dishes. My Russian Salad was indescribable! Awful dressing and slightly rancid-tasting vegetables. It was the Patatas Bravas which defeated us though. In fact we thought maybe he had brought us the Patatas with pink cocktail sauce by mistake, which was also listed on the menu. The bill listed it correctly though. As is traditional with this dish, the potatoes were cooked separately with the sauce dolloped on the top, but even Jess was not tempted by extra chips! So you should be able to see two plates of that in the picture, barely eaten.
On the positive side, I enjoyed my mussels and Paul enjoyed his potatoes cooked with chorizo. It did become a bit of a competition to compare who had actually managed to eat a complete dish of food. It reminded me of a lovely tapas bar in France last year, when we really challenged the chef by ordering everything on the menu!
On another positive note, it was a very cheap dinner, as they all tend to be in Spain!