Report from León - Part one

Today is our rest day, a non-walking day, in this beautiful city. But first I will mention the fabulous dinner last night. We had booked Cocinandos online...it is the restaurant we went to for Amr’s 60th 5 years ago, and again it didn’t disappoint. We managed to stay up and hungry till 9.30 which was quite a feat, and had worked out how to find it, about a 20 min walk. It is a very small restaurant- probably only seats about 20 people - and there is just a degustation menu (for €45 a person, plus €20 for matching wines, which we did)....amazing value compared to Sydney, or many places, but in France we experienced similar value for Michelin Star restaurant.

Anyway, we found it quietly perfect. The kitchen is open, so you can see the painstakingly careful preparation of the dishes. They had a menu in English for the day, but some things were lost in the translation ...but we got the gist. There were 6 courses, and as usual at first I wanted more and by the end i was getting too full! Highlights were: tempura zucchini flower stuffed with cod, squid with potato blackened by cooking in the squid ink, a “Caesar salad” with pigeon instead of chicken and mustard ice cream, a small steamed bun with ox and caramelised onion....and fig ice cream with sheep cheese, and something delicious to do with rhubarb, though we couldn’t be sure where the rhubarb was (communication was a bit disjointed but they were emphatic that rhubarb was a rare thing to cook in Spain...we wondered if it was what we know as rhubarb! All delicious, and the wines amazing too. We found we were familiar with the areas mostly, which they liked, and we had a great red from the Bierzo valley where we will be walking through in a few days, and where we saw them grape picking last time.

Will post this as part one, as we are about to go out again for the afternoon, having spent the morning exploring and a wonderful visit to the amazing cathedral. Report on that to follow.Read more