September 6, 2023 Travel to Vigo and Braga, Portugal. Lunch - Si la Bario in Vigo, Spain
We woke up at 8:00 and got packed and then made breakfast. Suzette combined the PPI rice, and steamed broccoli with Fresh hake sautéed in white wine, butter, and olive oil garnished with a puddle of the lovely tomato and onion sauce she made yesterday.
The result was fabulous and led me to adopt a new axiom for our travels, their fabulous ingredients with our cooking., which means that we can control the outcome, especially since the traditional dishes, except at the highest quality restaurants are pretty basic, on which we can improve.
For example, one of the most popular dishes is Pulpo Galicia, which literally is boiled octopus served with a few dashes of ground paprika and a generous squirt of olive oil. You dip brown bread served with the dish into the flavored olive oil for a simple and delicious accompaniment to the octopus.
The restaurant affiliated with the Nove Group of young modern chefs we ate at today is entirely different, producing cutting edge food with haute cuisine, non-traditional cooking techniques.
We had lots of rice and sautéed fish left, so we made a fish salad, by combining the fish, rice, three diced hard boiled eggs, and the leftover broccoli bound together with a mustard mayonnaise dressing.
Suzette peeled the three carrots we had bought and I sliced them into carrot sticks to take as snacks.
We then packed all the food and packed it and our grips into the car and drove to Vigo, a large city on a large bay of the Atlantic Ocean near the border with Portugal.
It is dominated by a high hill on which a huge fort is located that has been fought over since before Roman times.
We parked in the center and walked several blocks to the Marco Contemporary Art Museum that featured solo shows by two artists. We liked, one of them, Lluis Lleo.
It was 1:00 when we finished viewing the art and we had seen a cafe named Mama Elvira housed in and accessible through the museum, so we walked there and discovered it also had outdoor seating on a pedestrian side street. We took a table and Suzette ordered a coffee con leche and I ordered a large coke and we whiled away thirty minutes relaxing, talking, and people watching and feeling in harmony with Spanish culture as we recharged our energy level.
We then walked the two blocks to the restaurant and amazingly were not the first customers at 1:45.
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Si la Barrio is a Nove group restaurant, which means it creates amazing cuisine with the highest quality ingredients. For example, I saw bottles of Roederer Cristal and Gosset champagne in the large wine refrigerator next to our table and the wine list is 23 pages long. These people are serious about food and wine.
When the waitress explained the menu, it turned out there were three comidas del dia and a tasting menu.
We had eaten the huge delicious hake and rice dish for breakfast, so we chose the shortest four course comida for €29. Since there were two choices under each course the decisions were easy, we each chose one of them so we could share all the dishes.
We also ordered an albacore tuna stuffed oyster as an appetizer for €22.
One had to order from a QR code menu and Suzette could not access the wine menu at first, so we asked for the Sommelier and when she arrived we told that we wanted an Albariño that had been aged on the lees.
She brought two, one from 2013 and a 2022. We chose the 2022 because we wanted a more fresh, vibrant wine. The wine was 2022 Pazo Pegullal. It was lovely, light crisp with no overpowering acidity and lots of complexity on the back of the tongue. We loved it, especially for €25. We discovered in our wine tasting that aging on the lees (must) gives energetic and highly acidic young Albariño complexity, balance, and character. Pazo Pegullal had all those characteristics.
The first course was actually not a course from the menu, but a house starter appetizer, a leaf of endive filled with albacore tuna confit with a creamy sauce and bits of red bell pepper. It was lovely, especially, with the first sips of the light elegant Albariño. I had never had a fish confit before and enjoyed tasting one.
The second course was the a la carte oyster, chopped and mixed with several indecipherable ingredients except for a drizzle of olive oil and sprig of baby basil. We found it to be too salty, but the shell was the characteristic shape of Galician oysters, rounded and deep welled in the middle. Suzette loved the drizzle of good olive oil and kept asking for the name of the brand until the waitress went to the kitchen and took a picture of the olive oils to show us. There were two, Ybarra and Contorel??.
Suzette has been wanting to know what brand of olive oil the best restaurants use, so that may have been another of the big discoveries of the lunch besides learning that you can confit fish.
Then our menu appetizer was served. In my case, Vichyssoise garnished with chopped fried onions and for Suzette rice with baby diced green beans. I loved the vichyssoise but could not figure out why the color was dark green, so I asked the waitress and she told me the leeks became darkened because they had been smoked.
Suzette’s rice dotted with pieces of sardine was delicious, but she is not a rice fan and left some.
The entrees were a different story. They were not large quantities, but were both terrific. Suzette was served a small pile of Sautéed skate and I was served two cannelloni stuffed with tom rooster and sauced with a lovely tomato sauce that probably never saw a can.
The cannelloni shells were actually sheets of rice flour , like the ones used to make Vietnamese fried egg rolls, wrapped around the diced chicken meat, so remarkably similar in concept to Cafe Espana’s deconstructed take on ravioli.
I have decided to order pasta whenever it is offered because pasta seems to be the best source of carbohydrates that my body craves.
So I was a happy camper with this unusual and multicultural dish, Italian marinara sauce, Vietnamese rice flour wrapper, and stewed minced Spanish tom chicken. Although I considered doing so, I did not ask how old the chicken was and where did they find a resource for old male chickens.
The sommelier had been refilling our wine glasses as we ate our way through the meal and in Spain the high end restaurants seem to all serve wine in angular bottomed glasses with about 1/6 of the height in the bottom outward angle, so a pour stays cool in the bottom of the glass, but is only a couple of ounces. By the end of the entrees we still had a couple of pours of wine left, so we rested and sipped wine for quite a while, even though our waitress brought desserts and we ordered coffees con Leche.
Our sommelier, who was also one of the waitresses, was wise enough not to serve the coffees until after she had poured out the last of the wine and allowed us time to finish the wonderful last sips, even though the scoop of lime sorbet served with Suzette’s fried bread melted into a puddle of sauce.
Suzette ordered a traditional Galician dessert according to our waitress. It struck me as being somewhere between super soft French toast and a lightly floured custard served on a puddle of an intense lemon sauce.
I ordered the more traditional chocolate mousse that was served on a plate and possibly extruded from a pastry bag covered with small squares of fresh plum with a yellow flesh and served on a puddle of creme anglais. It was really delicious.
I had been looking at the hill that rose above the City and felt it was an excellent fortified position, so we googled it and found that it did contain a fortress, Fortress Castro.
So after lunch we drove up the hill to the fort and drove around the loop road to a mirador that looked out across the bay just below the fort.
It was impressive and the history boards at the mirador described hundreds of years of fighting over Vigo. For example, there was a war between the Spanish and English from around 1585. to 1592 that included the Spanish Armada in 1588 that was a failed invasion of England by Spain. The war was precipitated by the English, who in 1585 attack and held Vigo for two weeks for the ransom of supplies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_of_Santiago_(1585)#:~:text=The expedition gathered at Plymouth,
We then drove out of Vigo past a lovely equine statue to the eno resort at the Boussa Winery in Portugal arriving around 5:30.
It is a lovely large building sitting in the middle of 85 acres of grapes with an extensive contemporary art collection and many public sitting rooms.
We are the only guests but we were told that will change dramatically this weekend when a wedding party will arrive and a tasting for a group of Norwegian tourists occurs on Saturday.
We settled in and then changed into our bathing suits and went to the swimming pool but did not swim because the pool was unbeaten and the water was too cold.
We drank a glass of Martin Codex rose on a small patio near the pool and returned to the room and went to bed after another great day of food and travel.
Bon Appetit
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