vserna

In the Asturian dialect (yes, there is one), sea urchin is 'oricio'. You will see that name more often than 'erizo' or 'erizo de mar' on the menu of Asturian restaurants - and some non-Asturian ones as well.

Big, big mistake. You may have heard the WC Fields saying, "Never give a sucker an even break..." Well, here's how a restaurant critic with a quarter-century experience would translate it into our idiom: "Never give an obviously flawed restaurant a second chance."

Excuse me, but this smacks of masochism.. If Estrella de Plata were a great restaurant, I could understand that one would keep coming back again and again to see if it finally delivers: eight times in three years, despite all those lapses! But it's not a great restaurant nor has it ever been - it's a glorified tapas bar. So why insist in the first place? Barcelona is chock full of much more interesting places, tapas bars included! Life is too short to return to bad places.

Indeed. Spain is like only one other major country, Japan, in that there is a national passion for seafood and the consumers are willing to pay for it, even at amazing prices. (We usually lose out to the Japanese when they really want something - 90% of our baby eels and of our bluefin tuna winds up in the Tokyo market because they pay even more - much more!) Therefore, outstanding fish and shellfish can be found almost everywhere, even far inland. Two general principles: Galicia and, perhaps surprisingly, Madrid are the main hubs; and the difference between great seafood restaurants and merely excellent ones (as the El Barril chain, or Casa d'a Troya) is usually not in the quality of seafood available, but in the range and variety of what they have. Judith: Sanxenxo is a very small town, population 16,000. Pepe Vieira is on the sea, 200 yards east of Taberna de Rotilio. Next time, perhaps you should do what I did when I first went there: ask directions...

Not only won't you find it in NY, but elsewhere in Spain you won't often find a chef gutsy enough to place pig's feet, blood pudding and 'espardenyes' in the same dish! I haven't been to Xesc, but I think it's precisely what we're talking about here - lots of Catalan roots, but clearly modernized stuff.

My own choices: Top three in Spain: Combarro, Madrid - O'Pazo, Madrid - Casa Bóveda, Carril, Galicia. Top three in Catalonia: Botafumeiro, Barcelona; Casa Gatell, Cambrils; Hispania, Arenys de Mar. It's difficult to say 'when' - in summer there's this prejudice against having oysters, but then it's in summer that tuna fish is best! So good seafood restaurants will always have interesting seasonal fare.

I just spent a few hours' rest in a parador - something I hadn't done in quite a while. It was the Tordesillas Parador, in the heart of old Castile - a modern but pleasant terracotta-colored building resembling a Castilian mansion amid a pine tree-covered park. Breakfast did resemble a regular buffet, but I knew that the paradores will always have original regional fare. Only they don't advertise it - it's just there, with the rest of the paraphernalia - yogurts, scrambled eggs... I noticed a couple of foreign customers completely pass by three things that are, IMHO, a must in Old Castile: some very good cottage Burgos cheese, some home-made quince jelly that is traditionally eaten with that cheese, and a plate of glorious cured beef 'cecina' - the wild, pungent Spanish cousin of Italy's bresaola or Switzerland's Bündnerfleisch. The foreign customers looked hesitantly at the dark-red, irregular slices and went instead for a very undistinguished serrano ham next to them. It made me reflect on just how much one can pass by in Spain simply because one doesn't know what to look for - and no one explains to us what it is that is regional and interesting! (Then again, such explanations are hard to come by anywhere in the world...) I would never build a Spanish excursion around the paradores' dining rooms. As I've explained above, there is a bureaucratic organization here that's not conducive to great cuisine - and there are too many interesting restaurants around to waste your time there! For instance, if I had arrived earlier than 1.30 AM in Tordesillas, I would have stopped at El Torreón for some of Jeremías' great sautéed foie gras and grilled beef steak with some top-notch Ribera del Duero served in the proper Riedel glasses. However, in some places it may be more difficult to find alternative restaurants. In such cases, it's usually more interesting to be in a parador at the time they are holding some of their 'jornadas gastronómicas' - festivals around food or wine with special menus, which can be more rewarding than the usual fare. As an example, here's what they have in store for the rest of April and May: At Limpias, Cantabria, through April 30: Cuisine of 'mar y montaña' (sea and mouuntain). At Santiago de Compostela, through April 30: Galician cheeses. At Verín, Galicia, April 29-May 8: Dishes made with Limia county potatoes. At Trujillo, Extremadura, April 29-May 2: Extremaduran cheeses. At Santiago de Compostela, May 3-31: The artisanal, farm-raised Galician chickens are featured. At Cambados, Galicia, May 7-22: Cuisine and wines of the Val do Salnés in the Rias Baixas. At Tordesillas, May 1-8: Farm birds (chickens, poulardes, ducks...) and springtime wild mushrooms. At Santo Estevo, Galicia, May 6-15: Menus re-creating the cuisine of Galician monasteries. At Cangas de Onís, Asturias, May 5-15: Local products from Eastern Asturias (cheese, coastal fish, cider, kidney beans, wild boar chorizo...).

Reciprocity seems to work best. We have a group of rabid wine geeks in Madrid who'll often get together for dinner with a theme - 'Chinese cuisine, European wines' was it this week (at Madrid's new top-drawer Chinese restaurant, Yuan); 'recent Rhones', 'red 1999 Burgundies'... Everyone will bring one or two or three bottles along. We only pay for the food, and we wouldn't think of paying for the wines.

'Wrongo Dongo' is actually a favorite saying of one of Robert Parker's close friends in Baltimore. Ordóñez took it from him. BTW, Mano a Mano, a tempranillo from La Mancha in the same price bracket as Wrongo Dongo, is quite a mouthful of fine red berries. Like Wrongo Dongo, it's produced by Jorge Ordóñez with his Spanish partners Victor Rodríguez and Javier Alén.

Universal indeed.

No. It says clearly 'BEST RESTAURANTS', not 'favorite restaurants'. This is a fun list - meaning, basically, it's a total joke. The jury is almost uniformly British. Thus St. John is the tenth best restaurant in the world. Please! Nice publicity coup for the parochial Restaurant magazine, I'll admit. Everyone and his mother, from The Guardian to this very thread, is discussing this parochial award as if it were the new worldwide culinary Bible.

"Spanish sauce" is actually "sauce espagnole" and is not Spanish at all - it's a classic Carème concoction, basic in 19th century French cooking.

This is no great revelation, Judith. Everyone knows about it. Almost no top-notch restaurant in Spain will serve unmitigated, 19th century-styled regional dishes to you. Even 'traditional' places will most often try to develop streamlined, even minimalist versions in which Adrià's ideas are often, although often marginally, present. That is, they will try to be true to old-time aromas and flavors but will not attempt to serve you a heaping, fat, calories-laden potful of stew; they will also find more modern presentations. This is apparent throughout Spain (see the kind of food served at Las Rejas or Ca Sento or Quique Dacosta), but most obvious in Catalonia, where "let's be modern!" seems to be the national motto. There are good, commendable places like indeed Hostal de la Granota in Sils, mentioned in another thread, or Set Portes in Barcelona. But they are certainly not considered part of the current culinary elite.

Bux: 1890, the centuries-ago Portuguese... These are sufficiently old references to allow for a real 'tradition' to develop. Victor Merino first served his steak with blue-cheese circa 1975 in Cantabria, not Asturias, where I only began seeing it in the 1980s. I think that's a bit too recent to have the 'traditional' tag attached to it. And then it should perhaps be considered a Cantabrian dish.

The quips were caused by your Olympian disdain toward Pelayin's crystal-clear, well-informed post. This discussion shouldn't have continued for a minute after that.

Ca l'Enric is indeed the best restaurant in the area. The cuisine, however, is not fully fledged traditional fare, but it's subtly modernized. The only two places with un-modernized cuisine which have managed to hang on to a Michelin star in Spain are Madrid's Casa d'a Troya and Arenys de Mar's Hispania (actually, Hispania has mysteriously regained it this year after mysteriously losing it five years ago.) Of course purely traditional cuisine is a rarity these days in Catalonia. So a Ca l'Enric is as good a choice as you'll find.

scordelia, you are being unduly stubborn about this whole thing. I'll explain… If you knew Spanish history, you would know that King Pelayo of Asturias began the Christian re-conquest of Spain after it was occupied by Arabs and Berbers in the 8th century, which is the reason why Pelayo remains a proud name in Asturias and someone using 'Pelayin' (i.e., 'little Pelayo') as a moniker is an Asturian. Even without such previous knowledge of those rather esoteric and exotic historical details, Pelayin's post should have alerted you to the fact that he really knows what he's talking about when referring to Asturian cuisine. Now, if you demand "a reference", here goes. Not from Pelayin (whom I haven't met, BTW), but from me. I'm a professional food and wine writer in Spain. There are no traditional dishes consisting in any fried or grilled meats in Asturias. Grilling techniques are a latecomer to the whole of northern Spain, basically brought to the Basque Country in the early 20th century by Basques returning from Argentina and Uruguay, and it spread from there. Frying isn't common because olive oil was not generally used in the area (except in Cantabria, where a pipeline to Andalusian oil has existed since the Middle Ages). Stewing is the traditional cooking technique throughout the northern third of Spain. As Pelayín says, there has been for more than a century a French beef recipe, whose actual name is tournedos au roquefort, rather forgotten nowadays in France (cheese-based dishes are quite passé…) but still popular in places like Germany. About 30 years ago, a wily Spanish restaurateur called Victor Merino devised a local version in Santander, Cantabria, where he owned three well-known restaurants – El Molino, La Sardina and El Riojano. It was actually a beef steak with a cheese sauce, which he first baptized 'entrecot cabraliego' (i.e., Cabrales-style). When chided by proud Cantabrians because he was extolling the name of the competing Cabrales cheese whereas he was actually using Cantabria's own Picón Bejes-Tresviso cheese, he changed the name to 'entrecot al queso picón'. This became quite popular, and naturally it spread throughout Spain with cheaper blue cheese being generally used.

Yes, they serve it at typical and classic Asturian restaurants. Like Platerías in Madrid.

Mmmm... We'll have to do a rundown of the current Spanish cheese scene when you're here next! It might change your mind! That said , I've just returned from a grueling Madrid-northern Portugal-Manchuela-Madrid drive, 750 miles in one day (including six hours' sleep...), half of it with my station wagon jam-packed with 1,400 grape vines ready to be planted. Grueling. But - here's the point - at least I'm coming back with a neat prize - an artisanal, unpasteurized soft ewes' milk cheese I bought at Macedo de Cavaleiros today. These little devils are good enough to be endorsed by both Frenchmen and Spaniards...

Possibly Can Ramonet. No comparison with Botafumeiro. It's like comparing the Grand Central Oyster Bar and Le Bernardin. Yes, they both serve fish. End of resemblance.

Mmmmm..... That's like saying "I don't think you missed too much at Le Bernardin, except I will remember it for a nice bottle of Loire white."

Barbadillo, which produces Solear, makes more than 50% of all manzanilla bottles that can be found on the market in the world, and the wines are widely available worldwide.

Mmmm... What place could that be? Sometimes, the arrival of a new, gifted sous-chef (from Puerto Rico, for instance...) can have a very positive effect in that the established chef and the newcomer establish a dialogue which helps launch the restaurant in a couple new directions and reawakens the customers' interest. The proverbial fresh blood! PS No relation at all to all of this , Bux, but a passing thought. New Yorkers are very fortunate to count on such quality restaurants as Blue Hill, which are not frenziedly covered and exalted by the dominant media, which seem to seek more raucous styles (in the kitchen and in the dining room). Yet these places are the real proof that fine dining has come a long way in NY - not so much the 'in-your-face' school championed by the likes of Forgione and Portale 15 or 20 years ago, but truly subtle, ever-evolving fare that real food lovers from any place in the world will appreciate.

Well, it's healthy to have people with different tastes on the board. To me, FWIW, Platerías is one of Madrid's most awful restaurants, with a heavy sauce seemingly in every dish, and Champagnería Gala (not to be confused with Gala restaurant on calle Espronceda) is a so-what rice place which does not rank among Madrid's top 20 paella places. And indeed the bull's tail dish (not oxtail, at least according to the menu) is a risotto, not a paella, and has no point in common with Spanish cuisine. Risotto and paella have only rice in common - technically and conceptually, they are as different as pot roast and roast beef.

After a couple of so-called 'Spanish' meals in Washington DC during my current US tour, I encountered some dishes that resemble those strange concoctions, Pedro! :-)