Wine tasting in Madrid

I've been meaning to try out wine-tasting for pretty much the past 6 years - but there's always been some 'valid' excuse not to (time, money, going teetotal for abit, no-one else wants to go etc). Don't get me wrong, a lot of wine has been tasted during my years in Madrid, but little attention has been paid to colour, to bouquets and to woody undertones...lol.. Well, the other day, one of the lovely girls at my yoga class suggested going for a lesson at the vinoteca she's been studying at and it was the most fun I'd had in ages! For the paltry sum of 10 Euros we had a lesson on the basics of wine tasting from the lovely Antonio, then got to taste one white and three reds - all the while excitedly jotting down notes on the forms he'd laid out for us. Contrary to what I'd been lead to believe about wine tasting - we swallowed everything and there was none of that spitting it out stuff that I'd seen on TV programmes. After the main technical tasting bit, the 8 of us were invited to polish off the 4 bottles which he accompanied with some great jamon ibérico, tuna salad, cured manchego cheese and the best preserved red peppers I've ever tried. Needless to say, by the end of it, we'd all made friends and were more than a little tipsy. In order to assist one of the tastings you have to either be a student at the school, or be invited by a student (as was our case) - but after having such a great afternoon I'm actually considering doing the beginners course which works out at 75 euros for 4 2 hour sessions - for anyone else who's interested you can check out their website - I know it all looks a bit basic, but it's because they're in the midst of moving premises and I can promise that the quality of the tuition and the wine was spot on :-)

P.s. It's right by metro Almendrales - no I'd never heard of the station either - but it's about 6 stops from Sol on the yellow line.

Be a lady that lunches in Madrid

The good thing about going for an early evening aperitif in Madrid is the variety; one afternoon you might fancy cañas (tiny measures of ice-cold lager) at a bohemian terraza in the dishevelled yet increasingly on-the-up neighbourhood of Lavapies, another day it could be Mojitos in one of the over-crowded hippy-chic bars in La latina and sometimes (ok, very occasionally) you might just want to hang out in your local ‘old man bar’ – this Madrileño institution fascinated me for my first few months here; granite work tops, unflattering strip lighting, ensaladilla rusa (‘russian’ potato salad) cemented with dollops of mayonnaise, sculpted into domes and ornamented with olives and anchovies, slot machines, and of course, the ubiquitous old men, who line up at the bar downing black coffee laced with whisky, animatedly exchanging anecdotes or staring trance-like at the sports news on the flat screen TV. So '70s. Anyway, that was my poetic little bit about old men bars :-)

Sometimes however, you want something a bit different, you want to get out your best handbag and rub shoulders with groomed señoras with perfect helmet-hair and huge pearl earrings. You want to be a lady that lunches. Or at least a lady that drinks Martinis or enjoys her tea in fine bone china. Here are some suggestions for when a more pija ambience takes your fancy:

Living in London

I think I’ve blogged about this before. It’s a little ‘English’ tea place in the heart of Alonso Martínez (C/Santa Engracia 4). Decked out like Fortnum and Mason's and serving real Earl Grey from dainty silverware, it’s one of the few places in Madrid you can get a cream tea. I also recommend the bresaola and rocket finger sandwich. Has a little shop annexed to it selling such sundries as Walker’s crisps at extortionate prices, and a partner store a couple of doors down selling traditional English homewares – bearing in mind whoever owns this place must think Brits frolic about the house in chintz pinnies pruning our miniature rose bushes with William Morris stamped secateurs (Sp?). I love the sentiment however.

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El Espejo

In the heart of museum-land on Paseo de Recoletos is the art deco pavillion El Espejo. I admit that I’ve only been for a Vermut on the terazza but I plan to go back and see what it’s like to eat inside. Even if you don’t want to eat here, its worth ordering something in the pavement cafe if only for the people watching and live piano music.

Embassy

Maybe even a little posher than the above 2, after all we are ladies (and boys) that lunch :-) I ended up here completely by accident when meeting the friend of a friend. Established getting on for 100 years ago by an Irish emigree who complained that there was nowhere in Madrid where a lady could go unaccompanied for a cup of tea. Thanks to her, us ladies can do tea here (in company or otherwise). Great tea list, pastries, restaurant and delicatessen. Get to the tea room early to ensure you get a table.

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Spanish film night

Instead of watching the Spain-Chile World Cup match tonight I am sacreligiously considering giving it all up to curl up at home with a couple of DVDs. The reason? Yesterday I had a bit of an impromptu night out and let's just say I'm feeling a little worse for wear. What was meant to be quickly popping into the exhibition of a friend of a friend's comic drawings ended with a huge margarita in a bar whose name I can't rememember on c/Moratín. The excuse for such unsuitable behaviour on a school night is that I'm doing a guest post on someone else's blog on the best cocktails in Madrid and a friend had promised me the pisco sours in this unnamed bar were amazing. One problem, they had run out of pisco, so it's mexican cousin margarita had to stand in. More like kick in, I'm used to drinking margaritas in a martini-type glass, not from a bucket. Luckily my friends saw to it that I was home by 1a.m., but instead of sensibly going to bed I felt this was an appropriate time to watch an episode of desperate housewives and do a bit of writing. Anyway, it's now 3pm, I've just got home from work and needless to say the last thing I fancy is night of beer and football. Instead, I stopped by the fanastic cine de autor DVD rental place near my flat, Ficciones, and picked up a couple of Spanish films I've been meaning to see for ages: Isabel Coixet's Secret life of words and Almodovar's The bad education. I loved Coixet's My life without me (if you haven't seen it, please do, you will cry but in a good way) and I have to say 'Pedro' doesn't always float my boat so I'm hoping this movie will turn me round. I'll let you know :-)

Saturday evening

I had a lovely evening on Saturday - dinner at a friend's house, delicious prawns, lots of laughs and dodgy music :-)

G&Ts Bristol-style

Yesterday evening I met with a group of old friends for dinner at the Bristol Bar on c/Almirante 20 in Chueca, and as ever, when trying somewhere new, I like to give my opinion :-)

The decor in the Bristol is half English gentlemen’s club – half trendy Chueca and the clientele midweek is a smart after-work crowd. But perhaps the main reason to come is to sample one of the over 60 varieties of Gin on offer – perfect, if like me, your favourite tipple is a bit of ‘mother’s ruin’. As a Brit I have to say some of the props and references seemed a bit faux-posh and made me grin – the Churchill Lounge (pictured right, with portraits of said prime minister), the Upper Class Gin Club (puhleese!) and huge prints of Queen Victoria, the royal insignia and the Bristol Suspension Bridge. But then again, sometimes it’s nice to wallow in another nation's nostalgic view of what your country is like :-)

Back to last night. After a G&T – yes, I had a G&T before dinner, we sat down to eat. We started with some good foie gras with caramelised apple and melba toast, a couple of us followed this with bangers and mash and the others tried the Cajun swordfish, salmon fishcakes and club sandwich. The bangers and mash were ok, more than ok, but not amazing. We finished off with apple pie and custard – again perfectly acceptable but not-mind-blowing. Other Anglo Saxon influenced dishes on the menu are steak and Guinness pie, toad in the hole and fish and chips Refreshingly they had a good selection of international wines, so we went with a delicious South African red in honour of the World Cup. All in all a good evening and it was great to catch up with people . Would I go back? Maybe not for dinner but definitely for a drink and perhaps next time to sample their brunch and English breakfast. Chin chin.

Madrid la nuit

Saturday night was a pretty odd one. We started off on C/Pez, eating tapas in the Pontepez place of my last post and the famed cornflake chicken. The food got even more ‘innovative’ this time; a pear and rocket salad with pansies and mozzarella ice-cream, yes pansies and mozzarella ice-cream. Sometimes such odd combinations work, but for some reason this one didn’t work that well – but at only 3 Euros I’m not complaining, besides everything else we ate was delicious (alioli baked baby potatoes, croquetas and cecina – a type of cured beef from León).


Food was followed by meeting more friends closer to my neighbourhood. One of them had been invited to a party in a squat, yes a squat, by some random girl in the street (this really was a weird weekend) – to which I said NO WAY am I going to a squat. That sort of thing might have had its appeal as a grungy teen, but certainly not now! However, I opened up to the idea more when he told me it was in this palacete (little palace) near my house which had been done up but then left empty for as long as I could remember. I figured it was worth us dropping by and taking a 5-minute look just to see the interior of the building for the first and possibly last time. Drop by we did, and boy was it disappointing, we thought there’d be some sort of secret knock to get into this ‘illegal party', but no, it’s doors were thrown open to the public with huge banners inviting passer bys to come in. Once inside, it was obvious they’d made no effort to make things look nice, there was a makeshift bar selling stuff like calimocho, a hideous coca-cola and red wine mix that Spanish teens drink, and some kid attempting to rap - what was I expecting to be honest? All we really wanted to do was go upstairs and check out the palace, but when we couldn’t find any way up we asked the girl serving at the bar where the stairs were, whos reply was ‘today’s our inauguration, you can't go upstairs’. This kind of shocked me, to see someone who had illegally broken into and taken over a building suddenly getting all high and mighty about who could and could not access different parts of it!

Realising we weren’t going to see anything, we quickly left, ending up in Begin the Beguine on c/Moratín. It seems that Saturday was my official ‘seedy day’, as this little bar is possibly even seedier than a squat – though very, very atmospheric. It wouldn’t be my first choice for a night out, but about once a year I like to go there simply because it’s so different. From the outside you’d barely know there was a bar there as its shutters are completely closed and the door is hard to open – once inside, I can only compare it to what I imagine a 19th century opium den must have looked like! Tiny and smoky, brown wood-panelled walls covered in dusty second hand trombones and other wind instruments, everything has this sort of shiny brown patina of age, velvet couches, glass lamps – dominated by a large circular bar in the centre from where they serve huge caipirinhas in flower-vases. To be fair, there’s absolutely no debauchery going on inside, but it feels like at any moment some Matahari type figure is going to appear, donning a negligee and a cigarette holder and do some sort of exotic dance. Madrid nightlife is certainly never boring or predictable.

Cafe Alma

Ok, so first things first. Yes, I admit it, I am sort of 'back' :-) And as promised there will be restaurant reviews, lusting over design and lots of (positive, ahem) thinking out loud.

So to kick off, this is a tiny little review about the delightful cafe that opened at the top of my road about a year ago, Alma Cafe. Yes, the words delightful and my road in the same sentence. Alma cafe (c/Santa Isabel 42) is a bright white little cafe light years away from the typical Lavapiés bars (dark, moody and just one step too boho to be hygienic). It's somewhere you can go alone (and people frequently do) and read a book or catch up on the press that is provided there, hook up to the wifi, have a nice cup of coffee and a bite to eat. The perfect Sunday-morning-with-the-papers cafe. The decor is pretty, minimal but with a romantic touch and noone in there hassles you. The only thing I wish is that they'd have real loose tea, I might make that suggestion. Anyway, lovely. And a stone's throw from my house :-)

The cutest retro cafe ever

Thank you to my friends C and K for introducing me to Lolina, Vintage Café on c/Espíritu Santo (Nº9) in the Malasaña area of Madrid. This cute little cafe-bar is a shrine to vintage decor but in a clean, kitsch and gently shabby way rather than all out boho. The 2 floors of Lolina are decked with the coolest vintage wallapaper and lamps plus 'pleather' armchairs and those convex 'sunburst' mirrors that many of our grandparents had at home. We went there for breakfast this morning; 2.50e for tea/coffee (with the choice of soya milk) with either a croissant, plain or wholemal bread with jam or better still, pan payes with tomato and ham, but perhaps the best thing about this breakfast is that it was accompanied by the B52s and other hits of the era. We've also been in the evening and the nachos and hummus are quite good, though the main attraction here is really the aesthetic. The staff are pretty friendly too.