[Pigging by Wilfrid: September 8, 2008]
If Barcelona sometimes has the feel of a bustling northern European city accidentally displaced to the Iberian penninsula, Granada - for all the Alhambra tourist traffic, and for all its sprawling suburbs - remains a sleepy southern Spanish town at heart.
It's like a different country. It is a different country would be the diehard Catalan response. Don't think of eating anything, anywhere before 8pm.
Someone asked me only last night whether the Spanish dinner hour was truly as late as reputed (ten, eleven, midnight...). I agreed that it was. "What time do they wake up in the morning?". Early: it's very simple - shops and businesses tend to be open from around eight in the morning until two in the afternoon.
Then people eat and sleep. The siesta is alive and well, especially outside major centers like Barcelona and Madrid (and even there...). Shops open again for an hour or so in the early evening. Bars may well be open, but even those displaying a menu will tell you the kitchen is closed until eight.
Such was my recent experience in Granada. Personally, I relish a late dinner hour, but it was a struggle to find even early evening tapas to tide me over, other than in the heavily touristed streets around the Plaza Nueva end of the Calle de Elvira.
I had decided to storm the bastions of one of Granada's traditional fish restaurants. The hectic Bar Los Diamantes had had a closed-for-vacation look to it when I'd passed by earlier. The fish there is battered and fried, and plates thrown around like frisbees. Cunini (established 1953, I believe) had been a fancier, bow-tied sort of place, specialising in fresh mariscos. I also remembered a crowd outside waiting for it to open.
As the clock ticked toward eight, I led a charge through a series of almost identical little squares, each lined with restaurants, hidden in the old city behind the Cathedral. I'd neglected to check Cunini's address. It was discovered, just in time, appropriately enough in the Plaza de la Pesquedería.
Not too busy (it was August, after all), but the cool, blue bar was starting to fill with standing grazers. There's a large rear dining-room too, but the terrace - freshened by misty puffs of cool water - seemed appealing.
Fresh seafood is displayed in the window, and the long menu offers it by weight - in grams. I knew this was going to be expensive, but I was prepared to splurge. A bottle of good Agustí Torelló cava open and iced, I started to negotiate quantities with the waiter. Oysters were easy enough - half a dozen, pleasantly fresh if quite small.
I managed to acquire about the right quantity of shrimp too. Also small, sweet, but crusted with salt. It's certainly the Granada way to cook seafood by throwing it, in its shell, on a hot pan or grill, turning it a few times and chucking plenty of salt over it. The chef here had over-chucked.
Next up, three brawny cigalas, one for each of the party. I'd have ordered double the quantity, but the price per 200 grams made me cautious. Again, the salt was garlanded thickly around the otherwise tasty bodies. Readers may well wonder why over-seasoned food was sent back; you must understand the dishes were being served (family style, I suppose) as they came out of the kitchen, and after all the salting of the shrimp might have been an aberration.
The next dish, served cold, had eluded the salt-chucking grill chef, although it certainly wasn't under-seasoned. I last ate buey de mar, as I recall, in an excellent restaurant on Oxford Street in Sydney. I believe the choice bits had been extracted from the carapace and incorporated into a dish.
Here you had to dig, and fair enough - they had the tools for the task.
Not a heap of meat in the sea-ox, I'm afraid, and I should probably have set aside exoticism and just got an oyster.
I had anticipated that the first round of seafood would be a prelude to a longer meal, perhaps featuring a whole fish and some garnishes. Nobody, however, was prepared further to risk being remotely brined by the kitchen as we dined, so we cut our losses.
At least, I'd like to say we cut our losses, but the check was munificent...
I don't see a web-site for Cunini, but I'm afraid I don't want you to go there anyway. If you can find them open, Bar Los Diamantes or Bar FM (highly reputated, but I always hit its vacation time) might be better bets. The former is at least much cheaper.
