September 22, 2024 Lunch - Toston de Oro in Arevalo Dinner - Oven in Madrid

September 22, 2024 Lunch - Toston de Oro in Arevalo  Dinner - Oven in Madrid

We awakened before 6:30 to get ready and take Willy to the bus station to catch the bus to Leon and then Irun on the Spanish border with France to walk the Northern Route of the Camino.

We drove to Ribadavia by 10:00 where we stopped and walked through the old Jewish Barrio dating back to the 8th century and then ate pastries and coffee and I drank a chocolate at a bakery/cafe.

We then drove until 3:00 toward Madrid and looked for a restaurant in Arevalo in the province of Avila. After several failed attempts to find a restaurant that was not full, we ended up at Toston de Oro, a dining room in a hotel. It was busy with linen tablecloths and lots of waiters, so we were encouraged.

We were very hungry, so we were very happy when we were soon served two slabs of foie gras and bread and butter. I have never eaten at a restaurant that served foie gras (probably from pigs) as the free house appetizer. We were now in the heart of animal husbandry in Spain. 

Billy and Suzette split an order of grilled lamb chops and French fries. I misordered. I wanted lamb sweetbreads, but ordered a round stack grilled goat cheese on pimiento garnished with caramelized onions, pumpkin seeds, dried currants, and honey. Suzette loved the goat cheese dish and ate the caramelized onions in honey with bites of her grilled lamb and foie gras, but I still wanted sweetbreads so I ordered them. 

Everyone wanted to drink Red Rioja. We asked about reservas and mentioned Riscal. The waiter brought a Riscal Reserva and in his other hand, his choice, a 2001 Reserva produced by López de Heredia Viña Tondonia Winery in Haro. We chose the 2001 Tondonia. I have never drunk a 23 year old well-cellared bottle of Rioja Reserva. It was a revelatory experience, this was the best  Rioja I have ever tasted. It was smooth and complex with a slightly fruity taste as It opened up. We paid 32 Euros for the bottle that the waiter decanted so it would open up faster and checked prices on the Internet. The only one we found was $79.95 from a wine shop in Florida. I felt that this wine had been waiting for us in this restaurant the 19 years since release.

Finally, after waiting about 15 minutes a platter of lamb sweetbreads sautéed with oyster mushrooms in olive oil and slices of garlic arrived and it was the second best sweetbreads I have ever eaten, a mix of crisp and soft very tender sweetbreads, perfect. The first best sweetbreads were prepared in a puff pastry shell garnished with a wonderful cognac cream sauce served at the great Los Angeles restaurant, Scandia in the 70’s.

The lamb chops were excellent also, thin and grilled exactly like those we ate in Potes on this trip and the ones Billy and Elaine ordered at Eguren Urgate Winery fifteen years ago.

This restaurant was a lucky find by accident. Billy had seen it as we were driving around looking for a restaurant after having failed at the one we intended to eat at and one other.  Luck and persistence is often rewarded, but rarely twice in one day. At dinner it happened again. 

We drove on into Madrid and dropped Billy at his hotel and then drove to our humble hotel that was an old apartment in an old building that had been gutted and turned into a small ultra modern boutique hotel, Woohoo by name, with a large queen sized bed with a foam pad like we sleep on at our house that we sank into instead of the hard mattresses on full sized beds we have been sleeping or tossing on.

After dropping our gear we drove to the airport and returned our rental car without a hitch. We got out of the labyrinth of old downtown Madrid, found the freeway to the airport with one minor adjustment, found the rental car return exit and the Record lot in the short term parking area as if guided by luck and magic.

We returned the rental car and walked to the taxi stand at the airport and took a taxi back to our hotel and called Billy and then met him for dinner in his hotel lobby around the corner from our hotel.

I asked the man at the reception at Billy’s hotel to recommend a tapas bar in the neighborhood and he wrote, Vinitus, and directed us to the principal avenue, Gran Via, where it was located. Suzette said it was a four minute walk and although I was getting weak and we passed lots of interesting restaurants, we got to the restaurant around 9:00, only to find it full and folks waiting, which Suzette would not do. So we turned around and stopped at a large restaurant next to it named Oven that themed itself as a mozzarella restaurant. We went in and asked if we could sit at one of the tables outside by the street, because there were open tables outside under an awning and Suzette likes to sit outside even though, in this case, it was beside a very busy street full of fast moving traffic and a sidewalk full of people.

We were obliged and ordered three tap Estrella beers and sat down and were soon served the beers. As we sipped our beers I began to recover and noticed that Oven was built on either side of a large hostel named Woohoo and there was the most diverse, mostly young group of persons flowing by us on the broad sidewalk between us and the restaurant and Woohoo I have ever seen. We finally had hit the full wave of Euro tourism that we have been reading about.

I also have noticed that real estate development has been developed to a high Art in Madrid if one or two apartments in an old apartment house on a small side street are converted into small four or six room boutique hotel and old buildings along the Gran Via are being converted into flashy ultra-modern restaurants and hostels.  The only other place I have seen this was in the Latin Quarter in Paris where old apartment houses with small courtyards were converted into fancy hotels. Perhaps it can only happen in major world capitals cities. It surely did not seem to exist anywhere else we traveled in Spain. In fact on our one month of travel we have only encountered one other America couple and that was at a Michelin restaurant in Compostela, which you would expect might occur. Everywhere else it was almost all  Spaniards. But here on the the Gran via there were dozens of foreign tourists walking by every minute, many traveling with their cell phones as their guides.

Not only has the internet connected people (allowing me to communicate with you from a hotel room in Madrid), it has also expanded information exponentially that has opened up the world to travelers to explore. In Madrid the Information Age of travel was on full display in front of my eyes.

I wonder when all the amazing small places we have found and loved for 25 years like Sayulita, will be inundated by tourists, as Sayulita has been “discovered”.

As the human race grows, becomes better connected, and becomes more prosperous it seems inevitable. 

I needed to eat something and as soon as we were given a QR code on a 2 inch square piece of cardboard at Oven, Suzette read the menu on her phone and discovered a number of items made with burrata. Suzette suggested a burrata and ham pizza, which we all agreed to and ordered. When it came hot from the oven it was wonderful with small piles of Iberico ham and several areas of melted burrata and a few fresh basil leaves on a wonderful crisp and chewy crust. We ate 5/8 of the pizza and were given a container to pack the remaining 3/8 to put in the small refrigerator in our room.

We said goodnight to Billy and walked back to our hotel and went to bed at 10:30 after a brilliant day of amazing food and wine created by fortuitous mistakes. 

It reminded me of the young couple we met in Sayulita a year or two ago at a restaurant. When I asked them how they decided to visit Sayulita they said, “We did a little research and are traveling using our phones.”

Madrid is the proof that hundreds of millions of other young people are doing the same.

As is Willy, who bought his bus tickets, booked hotel rooms, and sent his unneeded luggage ahead to Llanes by Spanish mail delivery to start his hike of the Northern route of the Camino Santiago today has done using his phone and as Elaine and her friends, Cary and Dede, are doing on the Portuguese Camino Santiago.

Bon Appetit