La Madraza- Costillas Gaucho and cheap red wine

Have you ever waited desperately for an email or a text message or letter or some other form of communication from someone important? It could be hearing back from a job interview or waiting to find out whether that flash on the M30 outside in Madrid was a speed trap or just the low winter sun glinting off another car. It could be waiting in regretful suspense to see pictures of Steve’s stag party where you got "lost" in Edinburgh for 7 hours. I know what it is to wait. I know what it is to drive across Spain to see someone and to come away waiting without knowing, after all of that, what they are really thinking.

There is one restaurant in Seville which is guaranteed to be packed out every single day of the week and practically guaranteed to keep your mind off stupid day to day things like girls or men or dogs or plumbing or things which can only put you off your dinner. It's called La Madraza and you’re about to hear several good reasons why I love it.

I went there at the end of a very busy week which included work stress and aforementioned uncertainty in the Basque country, so I was looking forward to a hearty sit down affair with friends, rounds of bollocks (not to eat you understand, although this is Spain...) and several bottles of low budget Rioja.

First, we gathered in a small teteria (tea-shop) on a corner of The Alameda and had a couple of beers. Pretty standard so far. We were to go to La Madraza at the behest of our friend Babs who practically lives there 3 days a week, so as we supped our beers we sent her off as a Spartan Runner to get us a table (waiting times can be up to an hour depending on when you get there. Earlier is better).

By ten we were all sitting around a very small table, leaning in to talk to each other above the normal 90000 decibel Spanish racket and looking very much like overfed pink-faced communists or perhaps terrorists plotting something atrocious. As it happened, the lovely and reasonably attentive staff managed to find us another table and we kept the atrocities to a minimum by ordering absolutely the cheapest bottle of wine on the menu. Ha-ha!

The menu at La Madraza is very much like the average tapas restaurant in that there are two sizes of all the dishes on the menu. There are the full-priced, Racion size plates which generally come in at around 10 Euros and then there is the tapas sized equivalent of the same dish at around half the price of a racion. A small piece of advice- don't even contemplate ordering the raciones unless you have been trekking through the Bolivian jungle for 3 weeks living off a diet of grubs and sand. They might be fine for sharing, but none of us bothered and all stuck to the tapas which were plentiful in size. I ordered a lamb tagine followed by Costillas al Gaucho (Argentinian style ribs) and my friend Sophie ordered a solomillo of pork with goats’ cheese and raisin jam type effort. The good thing about La Madraza is that all sorts of influences are represented on the menu and there are nods to Asian, African and South American cuisines.

The tagine was unlike any tagine I had eaten in the past but by no means terrible. It was slightly bland, but this is often the price paid for living in Spain where spice is either seen as being completely evil, or simply used just to cover up low quality ingredients underneath. The tagine contained springy little lamb meatballs in a tangy but underpowered tomato sauce with the sauce to meat ratio bang on. It was a good but not amazing start and due to mine arriving first because of a service cock-up, we were all looking at Babs questioningly. Magisterial woman that she is kept a look of complete calm on her face and was rewarded when the next plates hit the table. The ribs were cooked perfectly. The layers of fat between the meat had melted away on the charcoal and left the remaining flesh incredibly soft inside while the part which had had contact with the heat maintained that dried, delicious splinter-like quality. They were served so very simply with great grinds of sea salt everywhere and greasy yellow Spanish style chips. So far so primal, until the other dishes arrived.

Solomillo with goats cheese and raisin marmalade is never the first thing I would order on a menu, but upon tasting my friend's, I decided that upon returning to Madraza, it would be the first thing I would demand they bring me. Soft, veal-like solomillo laying a solid foundation for the goats’ cheese and the raisin preserve. And then something that truly delighted me. Rob's cheesy solomillo had been served with, was I seeing this right, a side of English-style boiled cauliflower, broccoli and carrots, just like Sunday lunch? I have eaten in hundreds of restaurants in Spain and I have never seen this before. I was assured the veg was cooked, unlike Rob's mum would have done, just on the right side of crunchy.

I seem to recall that we polished off some rather unremarkable desserts including a cheesecake and something else which was boring. But that’s not really the point, seeing as we’d just scarfed 3 or 4 bottles of wine and a skip-full of food between us and left with our pockets lightened by no more than 15 Euros each.

La Madraza changes its menu on a regular basis and this, amongst other things, explains why the place is always packed, not by people trying to escape the drudgery and disappointment of everyday life, but by hungry folk rushing to experience one of the best budget eats in Seville.

If there's one word all tourists in Spain know, it's probably 'Cerveza'

I shall tell you a little about Estrella Galicia, and why I happen to think it rates as one of, if not the best of Spain’s domestically brewed lagers. The most famous Spanish lager is probably San Miguel, which all self-respecting British pissheads will know, is available in one litre bottles from Co-ops and Spars across the land and at a very reasonable price too. That’s because it costs around 1 Euro per litre here in Spain, and doesn’t taste particularly great. It’s bitter, thin and absolutely unpalatable unless you drink it at an arctic temperature, which is not always possible in Spain being that often the weather is as far from arctic as you can get. As I type this, it’s 7.20 in the evening and 36 degrees. You get the idea.

As I am currently residing in Seville, this leads us on to Cruzcampo. I once had the equivalent of four pints of this particularly nasty lager over the course of one evening and was spewing black bile by 2am. I don’t know if it was something I ate, but I will always associate Cruzcampo with crushing hangovers and blocked hostel basins. Which is a shame because it’s the beer you’re most likely to find here in Seville and indeed across much of the South of Spain

Mahou (pronounced ‘Mao’, as in chairman) is Madrid’s contribution to the Spanish beer market and for me, jostles with Estrella Galicia for the crown of best Spanish beer. This lager is also likely to give you a monumental headache come the morning, and the red-canned, 5-star variety certainly packs a punch. It reminds me of Stella a bit in its viscosity and syrupy nature and is truly a catch-up beer (A catch-up beer being one you would drink to catch up with friends who had started drinking before you). The weaker green-label Mahou is pleasant enough, but oddly, better in cans or litre bottles than on draught.

There are a couple of other national beer varieties- Barcelona has one (Estrella Damm), The Canary Islands have Dorada and there are a number of smaller brands such as Alhambra which are doing their best to break into the market with a wide variety of beers, ranging from classic blonde lager to dark, 'burnt-toast' beer. This aside, Estrella Galicia is still the best of the bunch. It’s particularly nice if you have it in the old Estrella de Galicia brewery in Cuatro Caminos in La Coruna and for me, it's the flavour of Northern Spain. The up-market, 1906 variety is even better and is often described as being herby and citrussy to taste.

Estrella is not a world beating lager, not compared with most German, Czech or Polish beers. It’s just, well, better than the rest of the slightly retarded Spanish beer family. Stronger, fuller, nuttier, thicker, maltier and tastier.