Dinner in the Plaza Mayor

In 1580 King Philip III commissioned the construction of a large town square for his new capital. He called it Plaza de Arrabal, the name still carried by one of its dozens of restaurants. The plaza has burned three times in its history, the last time in 1790. It has served to host bullfights, executions and soccer games. Rebuilt repeatedly, the Plaza Mayor, as it is now called, now serves not only as a chief gathering place for Madrid’s tourists, but also as a kind of dining room and back yard patio for the thousands of Madrideños who live in apartments. Following the compulsory afternoon siesta to avoid the heat, the main town square comes alive with diners, shoppers, tourists and people watchers.

Our tour of the city yesterday brought us to the Plaza Mayor, and we decided to return for tonight’s supper at an outdoor tapas bar called En Copa del Balún (In the Cup of the Ball). We both had a hunger for pizza, so that made up our first course, along with a glass of the local brew, a beer called Cerveza Mahou (rhymes with “cow”). Since the pizza was not large, I still had room left in my tummy for the local trademark dish, bocadillo de calamari. This fried octopus sandwich tasted like, well, a fried octopus sandwich. It wasn’t bad, but the dry hoagie roll on which the octopus perched could have used a bit of tartar sauce. After supper we wandered through the market, and I fell in love with a place that serves olives in every possible configuration—a hundred different kinds of olive salads, olives on skewers stuffed with dozens of different kinds of cheese, and olives both over and under several different kinds of Spanish ham. We had a hard time resisting half a dozen pastry shops, and a few other shops featuring specialty ice cream and gelato. We hailed a cab, returned to the hooch here at the Hyatt Regency Hesperia, and started getting our gear in order for tomorrow’s flight to Lisbon.Read more