Don't Have The Cow- Los Coloniales

Somebody asked me recently what rules I would implement if I were president of my own island. While I was thinking this over, we went through all of the obvious choices and conundrums; whether to legalise drugs or keep them at arms length of the law and if we would ban smoking completely. Someone may have half-heartedly entertained the idea of the death penalty and we pondered philosophically on how far we would go with the law-making before our (mostly-shared) ideal of a free society became strangled?

One of my initial thoughts revolved around food production, more specifically the consumption of meat and animal products and how necessary this is for an enjoyable, fulfilling, modern lifestyle.

I don’t eat much meat as a rule. This is not because I dislike the stuff- I clearly don’t as when I eat out, I tend to end up face down in a pile of grilled animal and it’s not because I’m particularly into animal rights (I’d love to try whaling!) Basically, it’s because I find meat expensive to buy in supermarkets or my local market, often of poor quality and frankly, as I’m not much of a chef, a bit of a hassle to cook or at least to make interesting time after time.

Growing up, most evening meals contained some meat, more often than not, pork or chicken and at the time I took this for granted (except for my stint as a veginetarian or whatever they’re called, but that's another story and it wasn’t for an entirely honourable reason).

Although as a child I had the luxury of eating meat for dinner most nights, I firmly believe now that eating meat should not be taken for granted and doesn’t need to make up such a large part of the average diet. Living alone, I know that eating meat every night is both uneconomical, unhealthy (for me, anyway) and, thinking on a wider scale, un-environmentally friendly. I much prefer to eat meat when it is of the best quality and given the treatment it truly deserves at the hands of a skilled cook.

I decided that if I had my own island, meat production and consumption would be limited or at least the idea of a limited meat consumption would be encouraged.

What was strange about this decision was that I took it straight after consuming what must have been at least 250g of incredibly tasty, slightly fatty, lightly barbecued pork churrasco. It was good; a ripe and perfect balance between almost crispy, charcoal-y, fibrous meat, and delightful, creamy deposits of fat throughout. It came served with a good dose of fried potatoes and peppers and a generous side splash of mojo picón, a spanish bbq sauce which is both vinagry and sweet but also ludicrously salty at the same time (Mediterranean longevity my clinkers. Everything here is slathered in salt, even the fruit and if you can find me a Spaniard who doesn’t smoke at least 20 Ducados a day, I'll take up the habit myself).

It was damn good, although nowhere near mind blowing. What is mind blowing about the churrasco at Los Coloniales is the price of the thing. For that much pig, no more than 3.55 of your hard earned Euros will leave your pocket. You can spend the rest on private health care to treat your high blood pressure.

It's something I'll never get my head round until someone explains to me the minutae of factory farming and supply and demand; how can that much meat, plus potatoes and service and cooking hours come to the same as a pack of Camels? I enjoyed what I ate but I admit it’s what got me thinking about meat production and the worrying lack of value put on the end product. (Incidentally, I’m not trying to confuse you here- a caravan of camels would cost much more than a few Euros- I meant the brand of cigarettes and now I realise I should have just written Marlboros. Has anyone ever eaten camel? If so, please let me know what it was like.)

Again, I’m not much of an animal rights person but I can’t help but feel that the simple existence of an animal, the space and the time and the money that it costs to rear the thing is being made into a joke and a non-issue when you can buy a large quantity of meat for the price of a couple of beers. The importance of how we handle and grow our food is being brushed aside for a few moments of satisfaction on a Wednesday night. It must come down to the old maxim of quality not quantity, with freshness and a higher price tag equalling nutrients and benefits and most importantly taste and the cheap and processed being a pale imitation of the raw material in so many ways.

Although both the churrasco and the solomillo are good, and extremely generous, meat is not the only option at Los Coloniales. There is a wide variety of Spanish staples on offer and some more besides. The restaurant is part of a mini chain of places with the same menu and same wonky service. Our waiter always seems to end up being this guy who acts like he’s withdrawing from a drug habit and his eyes occasionally roll back into his head in an alarming manner like he's about to keel over. I don’t mind this as long as he is carrying someone else's beer and not mine.

That aside, Coloniales is an extremely popular place and waiting times can be up to an hour depending on when you go. Midweek is best, but once you get a table, you’ll still probably have to sit outside under the patio heaters (hmm, cheap factory farmed meat and planet killing patio heaters- I realise I’m not selling this place to the Guardian readers).

I think though, if the tree huggers could look past these crimes, they would certainly have an enjoyable, and almost as importantly, cheap dining experience.

Apart from meat dishes, there are a number of decent veggie options on the menu. We tried the calamares del campo which consisted of a plate of lightly fried onion and pepper rings of different colours which wasn‘t very exciting but at least it added a bit of colour to a Spanish tapas menu, where 97% of what‘s usually on offer is either yellow or white or beige/brown.

I am a big fan of aubergine so I made someone else order the berenjenas rellenas (stuffed aubergines). Although berenjenas rellenas aren’t difficult to find here in Seville, Coloniales do the best example I’ve tasted- meaty aubergine flesh, still retaining it’s shape, filled with all sorts of tasty bits and pieces.

Serious veggies should watch out though, as they contain prawns. And bits of dead, decaying animal carcass which squeal and leak frothing blood everywhere. Mmmm.

Ubiquitous Chinese flan

I happen to think that if you’re not British, you probably wont understand what I’m driving at here, but if on the off chance you’re sitting reading this in an office or staffroom somewhere in equatorial Africa, I urge you to persevere anyway, because the story I'm about to tell you is nothing short of captivating. There is a special kind of grey, produced by the most solemn of British winter days, the kind of day on which as a child one's options for Sunday afternoon entertainment are severely limited. This grey pervades every element of the human being. It leaks into your cavities like a cartoon smell. Living in Spain, I occasionally think back to this soupy grimness with an silent chuckle, knowing that I'll never have to experience it again if I so choose. I also happen to think that this heavy, lumpen, indecisive grey helps form a large part of the British character. We can be heavy, grey, indecisive, ugly and cold. So can bad Chinese food. I know, I’ve eaten it. I’m sure you have too, but I want to tell you a story and its about me ok? Me,me,me.

I don’t know what it was about the other diners in the Hang Zhou Chinese restaurant near Seville's cathedral, but they immediately made me think of 70's television commercial extras. There was a man in a retro towel polo shirt. He had a moustache and he was wearing very short white shorts, as if he'd just finished a squash game. He was also very earnest, judging by how frequently he bent his head over his food to nod vigorously at his companion. My view of his face was distorted by falling fish shit and rotting food in the dirty water of a 'tropical' fish tank to my left.

He made think of the sort of man who might live in Welwyn-Garden City. I don't know what that is, but it has always sounded extremely mysterious to me, full of soft men in Alan Partridge sports gear. Oh and he had a Thai or Vietnamese wife which somehow completed the picture. She had a perm and looked like the bass player from Status Quo circa 1978. Slightly sinister, slightly sordid. When I saw him, and I came to learn how bad this restaurant is, I had the fleeting thought that he might be a hired diner, booked to create atmosphere and lure passing punters in. Of course, the level of depravity you would need to possess in order to hire this man to advertise your restaurant, neatly coincides with the level of pure, twisted sickness needed to produce such vile food. It made sense.

Never has the maxim 'you get what you pay for' been better applied than to this 'restaurant'. I visited this place at the end of a long month and as with all long months, the financial situation was ropey. When I saw a 6 Euro, three course Chinese meal advertised as I walked past, I jumped at the chance, surely knowing, deep down how upsetting the experience would be. Anyway, hope pushed me through the door, the hope that it is possible to pay bargain-bin prices for edible food (it is, but not here).

The interior of the place reminded me of a wild west saloon bar. It is split into two levels with lots of wood carving and surfaces in evidence. I didn’t stop to check if these were Chinese carvings. Or American for that matter as my attention was distracted by the massive fish tank right in the middle of the room. It looked like it was full of flood water and various marine debris (including, what was that? An eel?!) was floating around, slapping percussively against the sides. I was already reminded of the fall-out from a particularly violent natural disaster, and the accompanying queasiness didn’t make me feel like scarfing cheap Chinese food. but that was what I was here to do so I pressed on reluctantly. What initially attracted me to the place, aside from the price was the choice of six different three course menus, each costing 6 euros and comprising three courses. Good on choice I thought, small on quantity maybe, but surely not dog food? Somebody more cynical than I might see this set-up in a different way. Nobody going into your restaurant and eating a la carte? Then divide all your dishes up into 6 easy-to-manage, cut-price menus, hand write some signs and lure in the penny-pinching hordes. They got me.

Of course, If you’ve been reading these blogs up till now, you’ll have noticed a few things. Firstly, that they are currently perilously out of date and more retrospective than I would like them to be, but I’ll catch up, I promise. The other thing you might have noticed is that my judgement is occasionally impaired by an, some would say, excessive intake of alcohol over the course of a meal. I think when you have finish reading this, I will have been fully vindicated in this respect.

So after a couple of beers to settle the stomach, I ordered my food. I went for the classic combo of spring rolls, rice with three ‘delights’ and sweet and sour pork. I also ordered chicken with Soya bits just because the name aroused my curiosity. Rice grains that stick to the inside of your teeth and catch in your throat on the way down. Suspiciously gelatinous cubes of pork and frozen peas. I finally understand those people who say that when you eat Chinese food, you are likely to be hungry an hour later because when the rice arrived, it certainly looked a pile, but was mostly air and inedible vegetables. All I could do was smother the lot in soy sauce, except it had obviously been sitting in the sun so most of it was dried into a sticky slick at the bottom of the bottle.

It’s never a good sign when you see the owner and his family sitting away from the rest of the guests tucking into something completely different. They were eating what looked like wanton soup and glass noodles and it looked amazing. I had half a mind to march over and demand to share their food. Why not serve real Chinese food, you know, the food that the real Chinese people who run the restaurant eat every day? I was in a Chinese restaurant but the food I was miserably choking on could only be described as a facsimile 1950’s TV dinner version of Chinese food while I looked on enviously as steaming dumplings and fluffy rice was being doled out on the other side of the room.

At some point, one of the waitresses put down her chopsticks long enough to throw down a couple of spring rolls in front of me. They looked like lengths of dented lead pipe and when I exhumed the innards of these beasts, about 8 kilos of bean sprouts spilled out along with a microscopic cube of what looked like chicken, although it may have been a tooth and the saddest looking prawn in the whole world.

My sweet and sour pork(?) arrived shortly after, with astonishing speed. It was plonked down on the opposite side of the table and as I was sitting, for some unknown reason, at the biggest table in the restaurant, I had to stand up to reach over and get it, knocking a glass full of water onto the floor in the process. Things were not going well. Still, at least they didn’t try and charge me for the glass, or the water even.

The most distressing element of the evening was probably the texture of the meat, which was watery and gritty like ripe melon flesh. It had a layer of batter lying on top which had the look of an old postcard and the sweet and sour sauce was neither sweet nor sour but curiously salty.

To get me through this difficult time of self-abuse, I had resorted to more beer. I wonder if they even have a wine list, or whether it has been used to wrap spring rolls. It’s not really the sort of place where one orders wine, unless you want it served out of a Don Simon carton at your table by a depressed looking man in a white dress. Of course, my squash playing dining companion ordered wine and this is what he got. He also ordered dessert and coffee, which I avoided. His dessert was a pineapple ring from a can on a dirty glass plate and his cappuccino (he must surely have seen that the place wasn’t up to providing such rare and mystical brews?) mysteriously morphed into a glass of lukewarm instant coffee somewhere along the chain. I could see the undisolved granules floating in it from where I sat. He sent it back three times and then eventually gave up.

To show some solidarity to my new friend, I also ordered dessert. As the choice consisted of pineapple or the ubiquitous flan, I went for the flan, partly to make the others jealous and partly because I didn’t fancy pineapple from a rusty tin. So the flan appeared, still in its plastic supermarket pot and I ate it and it was the nicest thing about the meal and then I paid and then I left. Walking out into the Seville Autumn, the Giralda glowing majestically above me to my right, the bright Iberian sunshine lighting up the golden bricks of the cathedral I mused that that alone was worth paying six Euros for and then went off to find something to eat.