Ah, the foreign food ghetto of Seville always manages put a smile on my face. I don’t know if it was a conscious thing by some jumped up Spanish town planner or councillor, but there’s one little street in Seville, across the river in Los Remedios which is a veritable Global Village of food outlets.
On one unassuming street, you can find a Japanese restaurant called Samurai (apt, as the word samurai originally meant servants to the good and the great and you’ll find them all here, a restaurant where all the hippest of the hip young Sevillanos go to hang out) a Chinese, a kebab shop (not so hip), a Mexican restaurant and an Argentinan steak house.
Seville not being the most obviously cosmopolitan or culturally varied of places, this is really quite incredible. It also means that whenever I get bored of tapas (frequently) or it feels like there aren’t any new decent places to try near me, I head over to this oasis of spice and colour and get busy.
Come hither members of my extended family and gorge your stomachs on the tender flesh of the pampas for I am the gaucho from the heartlands of the west and to this end I implore you to hear tell of succulence and skin and brashness and blood and the tin and iron of a one million strong herd.
As I’ve said before, I don’t eat much quality red meat, only when it’s done well, so a flying visit from the ‘rents was an opportunity too good to miss. They were delicious.
No but really, I had them pay out for a good nosh at what is perhaps the best meatery in the city , Parilla Atahualpa and not a single tapa was to be seen anywhere.
The walls at Atahualpa are covered with vintage Argentinian warehouse tat- pictures of Diego Maradona in his pre coke days, posters of Avenida Nueve de Julio and antique Quelmes ads and it’s really quite nice.
The interior is like one of those New York Italian restaurants you see in gangster movies from the ‘70’s, with little wicker holders round the wine bottles and candles and red table cloths. I believe cosy would be an adequate but lazy adjective to use to describe the place; It does a reasonable job of making you feel like you’re in a Buenos Aires neighbourhood restaurant, until you glimpse the pissing teenagers across the road which reminds you that the cocoon is never entirely impenetrable and nor would you want it to be. I was a pissing teenager myself once.
We got there early and were the first customers so had the pick of the tables, although there weren’t that many to choose from and we kept the order basic.
No starters, just homemade bread and butter and then straight on to a massive mixed salad heaving with sea salt, which just about masked the fact that the tomatoes were probably grown in the shadow of a chemical plant in nearby Huelva and a bit cold. It was pretty good value though and very fresh and crispy.
That was the requisite healthy part of the meal out of the way, and I was glad we had bothered because I had a hunch as to what was coming next.
My dear ol’ mum ordered lamb chops and my dad and I shared the house speciality which is a parillada of two cuts of steak- solomillo and sirloin with the skin on and comes to the table on a raised grill pan or ‘Parilla’.
This contraption consists of a raised metal barbeque box type thing filled with hot coals which is intended to keep the meat warm as you chew your way thorough massive amounts of protein.
One neat addition was the frying trough or groove. The box itself was slightly tilted so that the meat juices ran down to one end. This heavenly meat runoff was added to by the waiter who, after setting the food down, melted into it a sliver or fat cut from one of the steaks so that we had one end of the pan filled with sizzling fat. The idea then was to ‘cook’ or seal each piece of meat you cut off the main steak in the fat, presumably to give extra flavour.
My dad has travelled extensively in South America and has spent a lot of time in Argentina but assures me he has never seen such a contraption before and he was enthralled, so much so that after a few glasses of Argentinan red (cheapest bottle 14 euros I think) he demanded to have one.
Both the parillada and the lamb chops came with chips which were ok. The lamb however was incredible. Judging by the size of the bones on the chops, the thing can’t have been more than 9 minutes old when it was despatched and it was milky and succulent and white and fatty and just magnificent.
The only complaint, if you can call it that, is that they gave us so much of what my mother described as ‘the best lamb I’ve ever had’ that it’s richness and sweetness became almost cloying after a while.
The slaughter of such young animal is another point for debate, although probably not here in Spain, where nobody really cares very much. The problem is if you take a stance, you have to stick to it and when somebody puts something like this in front of your face, you either drown in your own salivations and stick to the onions or you forget the frolicking fluff-balls for one night and enjoy it.
I’d been led to believe that the Argentines eat this sort of gut-busting meal on a regular basis. This is either complete bullshit or another of the great food mysteries of the world, up there with Spaniards gobbling deep fried fish all day and consuming copious amounts of wine and still all living to 164. The truth is that they do do these things, but not very often.
I suspect the same is true with the Argies and their meat munching. Special occasions, weekends, good quality stuff, plenty of greenery and good oil.
Argentina is somewhere I’ve always wanted to visit and possibly live. Dining like this every night would almost certainly kill me within a year, but I suppose if I interspersed the meat feasts with the excellent pasta available in Argentina and the odd lettuce, I might end up making it two. A visit to Buenos Aires is on the cards, but for now, Atahualpa makes a ready substitution for the real thing.
