Barely awake we head down for the 9:00 pm meal. We put on our best smelly and wrinkley clothes. April wears her dress for the first time. The restaurant is beautifully decorated and we feel like posers.
A husband wife team own the hotel and restaurant. Pere is the chef, Maria is in charge of everything else and is the waitress too. They're both very nice, and they've put their heart and soul, and probably all their money, into this endeavor.
The menu is only in Catalan, and we've learned the simple Catalan words, but these are fancy food words so we don't understand anything on the menu. There's a four course meal for $45E, that seems like our safest bet.
The trouble starts with our first course. The default course was a sardine thing on garbanzo beans. Well April wasn't going to eat sardines so we managed to talk our way into a different selection. Maria offers a pigs feet option. That's a no-go. So we settled on a foie gras pate thing. I figured maybe April might eat some of it.
The chef sends out two amusee bouche (sp?). The first is a clear tomato gelatinous thing with a tiny sardine piece on top of it. Not bad. The second is like an apple fritter thing with some small pork bits on it, and sitting in olive oil. Really good.
Then the foie gras comes out, it's two rounds on each plate, dressed, each about the size of a silver dollar, and maybe half an inch in height. Very good but rich, so the perfect sized portion. April takes the tiniest bite, decided she can't eat it. So as usual I have to eat hers too. Like I said, it was rich.
Then the next course is a marinated tuna thing. April eats about half of hers, so I have to finish that for her. Sigh, this always happens to me. Once I France, with the whole family, I made everyone eat at this high end restaurant, and I had to eat all sorts of weird shit, black soggy bacon, raw strange fish, etc. Another time at a Mtn hut I had to eat like five portions of crappy risotto with mushrooms.
Ok, then Maria is talking about the third course, and we're trying to converse in French, mine is rusty, and even in the best of times is clumsy, her French seems just as bad. It seems she's saying something like "awniuon". It sounds like onion. So I say "onignion", meaning onion. We go back and forth a few more times, and we seem to agree, it's going to be stuffed onion. Seems kind of weird, but what the hell.
The third course comes out, and it's stuffed lamb!!! This is April's least favorite food, she can't even stand the smell of it. The word in French for lamb is agneau. Kind of like she was saying. Fucking A. I was so god-damned stuffed with rich food by this point, that not only could I not enjoy mine, of course I had to eat April's also. The people were so nice, we didn't want to leave untouched food on the plate. So I slogged ahead, and managed to get all of it down. By this time I had essentially eaten two full meals. And luckily we only had a half bottle of wine.
Desserts we're fine, a rich black cake covered with a cream top. Christ I felt sick. We rolled up to bed and I fell asleep immediately.
April brought up the menu to translate it, and it seem the lamb entre was actually goat. It had a mild taste, delicious actually, if only I wasn't stuffed like a Catalan pig. But April said it being goat was even worse than lamb. Haha!
I swear I'm not talking April into any more high-end places where we don't really know the food.
But then again there's some famous place in Girona that has a 23 course meal. Who knows what the future brings!
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Location:Banyoles, Spain
Happy to get a post from our favorite Catalan piggy!
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