Connoisseurship and criticism in the art of The Kebab.

At the end of next week, I'll be moving to Seoul, South Korea where I will undoubtedly continue to write these blogs, updating you with food experiences from the New World. However, what I have for you this evening is an account of the most incredible, sumptuous, delicately fragrant food from the oldest of worlds, biblical in its simplicity but simply complete and excitingly earthy.
Down a back alley off Stoke Newington High Street in London, lies a veritable mecca for fans of Turkish cuisine. Mangal Ocakbasi is an unassuming bring-your-own-booze kebab grill house, which I have absolutely no problem calling my favourite restaurant. In the world. Ever.
The reasons for this are manifold but range from the outstanding quality of the kebabs on offer, to the freshly baked flat bread to the most incredible, smokey Şakşuka, a starter of oily aubergine, tomatoes and onions.
One of the best things about the place though (other than the outrageously cheap prices) is the sense of old-world theatre surrounding it.
This feeling of authentic Trojan drama starts as soon as you walk through the front entrance. As you open the door, an enormous convection chimney sucks the outside air into the room, flinging you into a wall of smoke, primary colours and amazing smells. Once you're sucked safely inside, you walk past the grill and get a view of the enormous kebabs and skewers on offer and sit yourself down with meat on the mind.
On the menu are thirteen different kebabs, mostly chicken or lamb and you can choose minced or cubed meat. As well as the kebabs, there are yoghurt dishes, where the meat from the kebabs is mixed with yoghurt to make a sort of meaty, yoghurty dry stew/curry.
Typically, I visit Mangal with a good friend of mine, Jim Cotton, who actually introduced me to the place and typically, we order the mixed meze (hummus, aubergine, yoghurt and tomato and onion, always great) followed by lamb shish and the chicken Tavukbeyti. I get the impression though, that anything you order here would be absolutely as if Ataturk himself had grilled it on a middling Autumn evening somewhere on the great sweep of the Bosphorous.
The meat is of the best quality and the lamb shish perfectly cooked; smokey and charcoaly on the outside and erotically innard-pink in the middle, where the meat has been kissing the skewer. The Tavukbeyti, or minced chicken with parsley lemon and garlic is the real star of the show though. Perfectly weighted with salt and lemon and garlic and all of the fresh, base flavours of humanity that are so instantly and primally satisfying; those flavours that release an intense injection of narcotic satisfaction into the brain. This is food that humans have been eating since the dawn of time, unsullied and unadulterated by the spice trade or any twist of modernity. It is humble, yet creamy, luxurious yet composed of natural, good things, ruffage and vegetation, caveman meat cooked over an open fire, ingredients that would have been gathered and hunted by our forebears in Byzantine lands.
After the carnage, comes some sweet relief and although we were more then satisfied by the meats and meze, we ordered baclava which was rich with oily honey but also crunchy and meaty with nuts; an excellent end to a fine repast.
So, if you're ever in Dalston or round Stoke Newington way- fascinating areas in a modern city, one which is changing increasingly rapidly- make the trek to this outstanding place and dodging new wave idiots wearing vintage pants on fixed-wheel bikes, drop in for a taste of something that probably hasn't changed much in thousands of years and hopefully won't for millenia to come.

Neo-colonialism and duck tongue

Think of all of the different uses for your tongue. In no particular order of usefulness: tasting, licking envelopes, cleaning your teeth, talking, getting stuck to icy things, painting, obsequious flattery...the list goes on. Have you ever wondered though, what uses a duck might have for its tongue? Perhaps you haven't. Did you even know that ducks possessed such organs? You probably didn't.
Well then, it's lucky I'm here on hand to tell you that ducks do have tongues and that they taste horrible.

I was in London last week on business (well, not really it just sounds good) and to make a day of it, I thought I'd have a spot of lunch in Chinatown. After a lovely walk through Embankment gardens in bright sunshine, I got to Chinatown and began my quest to find the dingiest place with the best eighties decor in the neighbourhood. As I walked past one row of restaurants, I realised there was a police crime scene happening outside a bookies at the end of the street, complete with police tape and bloodied clothes. I had found my spot! The most authentic looking place on the street was London Jade Garden, so I popped in and got a table for one.

The menu here is great, over 40 items of dim sum which you tick off on a little paper menu thing they give you. The service however is rubbish. Having lived in Spain for a few years, I'm quite used to surly staff and bad manners and I've learned to laugh it off and when you stop taking the whole thing quite so seriously, bad service can actually be very funny. Especially when an tiny, angry Chinese man is thrusting a plate of ducks tongues under your nose.

Once I saw this on the menu, I couldn't resist ordering it. There are plenty of other agricultural by-products on offer, from chicken claws to pig's trotters but the one that jumped out at me was the duck tongue in black bean sauce. I ordered this and some other dim-sum dishes and sat back to wait, listening to the punters sitting nearby complain about the service.

When the food arrived, I was presented with a plate of around 10 duck's tongues in black bean sauce. Never having eaten duck tongue before, I had no idea how to proceed and so picked up one of the tongues in my chopsticks and had a closer look. They are sort of tongue-shaped with a hard bone or piece of cartilage running down the middle. The sauce disguised the colour, but they had been boiled and when I scraped off a bit of the coating, it turned out they were a lustrous and appetizing grey. As is often the case with offal and cast-off bits of animal, it isn't so much the taste that's the problem, rather the texture. The taste was overwhelmingly of the sauce, but there was a hint of weird ducky fishiness underneath the complex blanket of flavours administered by the sauce.
Now to the texture. I would liken it to eating mussels insomuch as you have to scrape the meat off the 'bone' with your teeth. The one thing it reminded me of most though, was eating pig's ears in Madrid. A similarly gelatinous, rubbery quality adhered to a hard piece of cartilage which was pretty awkward to eat.
I'm sure duck tongue is a speciality in China and is probably very popular but I do not recommend ordering this if you see it on a menu anywhere. The other dim-sum dishes I ordered were excellent but next time I have Chinese food, I'll probably just stick to the business end of the duck, shredded and rolled up with plum sauce in some pancakes. Xie xie!

What's the worst/strangest thing you've ever found in your food?

Long dormant but still champing at the bit, ready to make mouths water by invoking the myriad and complex flavours of the New World, I'm back and haven't you just missed me?
Moving away from the traditional Pastry Disgrace formula of reviewing restaurants and what they do best, I find it can be equally fun to look under the grubby sofa of the food industry.
So, to fill you in on my absence, I've been working at a summer school, where the food wasn't quite inedible but did disappoint with its monotony and low quality ingredients, often unfortunate traits of large-scale catering on a budget. Saying this, when you're hungry, you eat, right? That's right.
The school had a couple of hot options every day and even had a healthy salad bar available every lunch and dinner time. The bar contained an assortment of greenery, tomatoes, cold meats, and leftovers processed into the likes of potato salad and I think it's safe to say that everyone took advantage of it, if only to break up the monotony of the school-dinner like hot options (lumpy custard-check, weird jelly desserts-check, bad gravy-check). That was, until weird things started showing up in the salad leaves...
The strangest apparition was one lunch time amongst the lettuce when what appeared to be tree leaf, brown, curled, dead and full of gritty mud sat winking at me from amongst the rocket. Thankfully, it didn't go in my mouth but it did remind of some other awful experiences with foreign objects in food that just shouldn't have been there.
One of my favourite stories comes from my brother who swears blind thathe found a whole cow's eyelid, replete with eyelashes, lurking under the pastry of a "Fray Bentos" pie!. Another friend of mind once found a pig's tooth in her Chinese meal. So in that spirit, this week's blog asks: What's the worst thing you've ever found in your food?

Lamb of God and other fables from the New World...

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.

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.

Upon The Sacred Mountain

It was a Tuesday. Or a Saturday. Or a Monday. It was a day. A very hot day. Not wait, that's rubbish because very hot conjures up saunas and beaches and summer holidays and this was beyond that, beyond anything I had ever experienced. It was still sort of summer (half way through September) but the temperature was at least 38c and Seville was sweating and I was regretting. Regretting coming to such a cursed, wretched, sun-blasted, shirt-soaking place. Regretting not staying up in The North with its sea breeze, wonderful fish and scenery, not to mention girls. But then it happened.

Ducking my way under some scaffolding, weaving between antique barrels and men wearing wax jackets (that’s right folks, 38c) with oily hair sipping ice-cold sherry, I stumbled upon the Holy Grail.

What I'm about to reveal to you should be locked in a safe somewhere, the only access given to people in bio-suits or kept for those living in a terrible dystopian future to gaze upon misty-eyed, looking back to an age when animals skipped merrily in the fields, and when we didn’t know what else to do, we put them in an omelette. That’s right. I'm about to reveal to you The Power of Sacramonte, the ‘sacred mountain’ (compacted disc, to be fair) of egg and potato and chorizo and pepper and onion and various other bits and pieces that are left over from God knows how long ago.

The first time I had this magnificent creation was at exactly 3.11pm. I remember making a note of it (but oddly I don’t remember the day) thinking to myself that the magnitude of this experience will be forever unparalleled in my time on this earth. It was drug-like, almost hallucinogenic, holy. If there is a heaven then this is surely to be had at the top table most lunchtimes. Angels probably shit it or something. It’s that good.

Anyway, I’d steered past the men dressed as hunting aristocracy in their little tasselled loafers and wax Barbour jackets, and positioned myself at the bar, which in this particular bar (don’t know whether to give the name away or keep it secret. I expect I’ll tell you later but only if you’re good) is a wrap around job containing a wonderful assortment of sandwiches, tortillas, pickled cheeses, olives, unidentifiable pieces of pig, pastries and other Iberian accoutrements.

What caught my eye however, amongst all of these delicacies was an omelette unlike any I’d ever seen before. It was yellow, sure, but it was also green and red and meaty looking and it was the size of a tractor tyre. It glistened, and it dominated the bar and not just the part where the food was arranged but I mean the entire bar. I ordered a beer and peered at it some more, trying to decipher what it was made of, what was contained within its springy, muscular walls.

Some people say that the Sacramonte originates in the inhabited caves of the same name near Granada but I prefer a different story. Legend has it that the abbot of the Monasterio de San Cecilio in Granada was expecting a few local dignitaries for lunch one weekend, and had rounded up a few lambs outside ready to be slaughtered and roasted on the day of the party. He woke up on the day of the feast only to find the lambs had been stolen by a local criminal gang. Desperate for something to feed his important visitors, he rustled around in the monastery larder for leftovers and this is what he found there, all ready to be turned into an omelette: as well as all the obvious tortilla ingredients, the ingredients on that day and even now often include, but are not limited to, lambs brains, testicles and pieces of tripe. I’ve encountered kidney, chorizo, turnip tops and peas not to mention all sorts of other tasty little treats contained within the eggy outer skin of the sacramonte. The more the better I say.

One night, my friend Rob asked the barman how many eggs it takes to make a sacramonte. Any guesses? 10? 15? Well, you’re miles off. It takes 26 of your finest Spanish eggs to accumulate enough cholesterol to craft a sacramonte. Just to give you an idea, a normal tortilla de patatas is cooked in your bog-standard frying pan and is generally made with 4-6 eggs. You wouldn’t, though, be able to get this thing in a standard oven let alone frying pan. God knows how they cook it but I'm glad they do.

It tastes wonderful. I shall now try to explain to you the combination of flavours that hit you as you shovel it past your taste buds. Firstly, the texture is excellent. It has bite and it is meaty but yet each individual component (particularly the onions) forms their own compartments within the whole so you get an almost honeycombed, slightly aerated effect in parts where the egg has set and formed little chambers around the other ingredients. This means that if you bite into a mouth-sized

portion, you get an amazing cross-section of ingredients and flavours. Bite down upon the eggy outer casing and you might get to a piece of sweet onion, then to a cube of chorizo or lump of succulent brain and then some potato all in one mouthful, the flavours coming one after the other. The ingredients work so well together in perfect harmony. Creamy egg, soft bland floury potato, sweet slippery slivers of onion, salty, peppery chorizo and fatty wholesome brain and offal.

I have yet to visit this bar (La Bodega on Plaza Alfalfa by the way- well done, you behaved) without eating at least a wedge or two of Sacramonte. It works in the grand tradition of leftover foods such as bubble and squeak and dishes which taste better the next day, cold even. With flavours intensified and combinations long tried and trusted, the beautiful simplicity of putting whatever you have lying around into a pot (you don’t need the brains and kidney, chorizo on its own will do) and combining it with potatoes and eggs works so well. It’s the taste but it’s also the practicality of the dish which gets me. It's like Calzone or anything between bread. It makes so much sense, it’s so practical, you get all you want in an uncomplicated plateful and you get all the flavours in one bite. This will forever be the taste of Andalucia for me.