Post by Wynette:
If you’ve read any of the menu board photos that we’ve posted, you probably see lots of unrecognizable food. Even after many trips to Spain, we still have to look up most items. We discovered a nice trick at some point on a past trip: look up things in Google Images. It’s good to translate as well but often that doesn’t help much. For example, today we had Merluza a la Gallega. Merluza translates to Hake. But looking up Merluza a la Gallega on Google and then clicking on Images (just under the search bar) brings up photos and you get a pretty good idea of what you will be getting.
Another hint: The other day a menu had lorios and when I translated it got lilies (the flower). So I changed it to lorios comer (“comer” means “to eat”) and searched on Google Images and found it was little fish of some kind. I’d have to do more research to know exactly what kind of fish but at that point I decided I wasn’t interested.
We did order the Merluza today. When the server asked us later if we liked it and we said we did she said it was “tipica”. People mention that a lot about their food. It means “typical” and it’s their way of saying they are very proud of their local food. “A la Gallega” means, essentially, “from Galicia” or “of Galicia”.
Moira pointed out to me that the common New Mexico surname Gallegos means (more or less) “from Galicia.”
Yes, we had heard that, too. That is what the people here are called: Gallegos