Food and coffee in Madrid

Post by Wynette: We’ve been in Madrid for 3 days.  Tomorrow we head back for the USA.  We have liked Madrid, more than we expected.  It’s a beautiful city and relatively restful, inexpensive, and easy to navigate for a big city.  Of course, we are tucked into our hotel room by 8 each night and we hear the city really comes alive at 10 or 11.  So, we are missing the main attraction: the night life (called la marcha as I have learned from Ben and Marina).

The first 2 days we were disappointed in the food here.  And, I have to take back what I said about coffee in Spain being consistently good.  We haven’t really liked the Madrid coffee very much.  It must be Catalonia that makes such good coffee.  The coffee at the place below didn’t taste very good but they sure had a cool looking coffee machine.  And all the waiters wore pink shirts:

But this morning we did find a place with good coffee, and yesterday we found a tapas market (really!) (Mercado de San Miguel) that had tapas fenomenal! (Yes, that’s a Spanish word.)  Here is Charlie trying to decide what to have for dinner:

And today we ate in an Asturian restaurant (Asturia is a province in northern Spain, so it’s like a foreign food place in Madrid) named Casa Lastra. Delicious food. Seemed like peasant food.  We had a white bean stew with sausages and ham.  I’ll dream about that one in days to come and try to make one like it but will never come close. Here is the bread and the huge helping of (fenomenal) blue cheese spread that they brought to the table before taking our order.  The only problem is that we were stuffed when we left. No, we didn’t eat all the bread and cheese.  We couldn’t finish the stew either.

I love the description of their restaurant in English on their website. (I’m pretty sure a computer program did that translation for them. Maybe Google Translate?)  I hope we go back to Madrid so we can go back to Casa Lastra several times.  Hmm, maybe we should go to Asturia someday too.