Eating his way to the heart of a city

By NICK WOODSWORTH.

06/15/2002
Financial Times

It was sunset when I drove over the causeway that crosses the bay to Cadiz, and twilight by the time I found parking in its congested old streets. It was still hours before any self-respecting restaurant would open. I was hot and thirsty and threw myself through the doors of the first bar I could find.

It appeared, anyway, to be a bar. El Portillo sat tucked in behind the church of San Francisco in the street of Isabel la Catolica. The bar, too, had a catholic outlook, at least in its interpretation of what a bar might offer. For it was corner grocery, hardware store, social club and creche.
A football game was on television and a nappy-clad infant was on the counter when I entered. On, around and over the counter, in no discernible order, sat a proliferation of assorted merchandise. Bottles of sherry stood beside shelves of dishwashing liquid. Ballantine's shared space with baby food. Crates of oranges and cauliflowers lay stacked on the floor. Umbrellas, toilet plungers, kitchen strainers and a 12-part screwdriver set hung from the ceiling.

Sighing with satisfaction, I shifted half-a-dozen pot scourers and made space at the bar. I ordered a glass of manzanilla, the fine, dry, sherry produced along this coast. No matter that the handful of other patrons of the bar were drinking that off-putting Andalusian warm-weather tipple - red wine and fizzy lemonade. This was my kind of place.

It is not that I think cauliflowers and toilet plungers are the finest decorative accompaniments to the aperitif hour. But I had just driven round the Straits of Gibraltar from the Costa del Sol, that place of ersatz flamenco bars and tourist-menu paellas.

Cadiz, on the other hand, sits on Andalucia's Atlantic coast, is off the tourist map, and has some of the finest fish and seafood in Spain. Just as important, there was a warmth and sociability in El Portillo that somehow transforms even the simplest food. "Coma! Coma! Aqui, todos somos familia" - "Eat! Eat! We're all family here" - an elderly couple urged me to try the cheese, anchovy-stuffed olives, fried potatoes and other modest tapas they were enjoying. As for the chaotically comfortable surroundings - they simply showed that people here accept food and drink as inseparable from the thousand other things of life.

An hour later I had moved down to the Plaza San Francisco and Juan Reyes's more sophisticated Taberna la Barberia. Reyes is a hedonist of the first order. His establishment is small - most tables sit outside on the plaza by the fountain. His wines are select; his oloroso dolce sherry from his own family vineyard has such a wonderful bouquet that - I am not putting you on here - he loves to wear a little of it on himself, like cologne water. Equally extraordinary are his banderillas de atun de almadraba y queso payoyo.

They sound complicated; they are really just chunks of cheese and tuna on oversize toothpicks. But what cheese and what tuna.

The goat's cheese, fresh and aromatic, is produced in tiny quantities in the rocky Sierra de Cadiz behind the city. The tuna, also local, is even more special. Once a year, schools of 1,000lb red tuna sweep through the narrow Straits of Gibraltar to spawn in warm Mediterranean waters. They are caught by local fishermen in almadrabas, vast, labyrinthine nets of ancient Roman design snaking out from the shore.

Straits tuna is one of the oldest fisheries in the world, Reyes told me. Firm, uncooked, marinated in oil and eaten along with cheese, it is also one of the most flavourful.

The glasses of oloroso kept coming and dishes such as boquerones en vinagre - raw fillets of tiny sardines packed for 48 hours in salt and red-wine vinegar - kept tempting me to try more seafood tapas. It was a long, self-indulgent session and I never did get away from the Taberna de Barberia that evening.

Like a tuna trapped in an almadraba net, I woke the next morning feeling a certain amount of cerebral confusion and pain. This was definitely a day for dark glasses, I decided as I sat on a noisy terrace with a cafe con leche in the morning sun. For I was headed to an even noisier, more brightly lit place - the fish market at the Mercado Central.

Fish is so popular in Cadiz that you can find costermongers selling it from wheeled wooden barrows on neighbourhood street corners. But the fish market is an institution of a different order, a lofty, well-scrubbed, white-tiled hall where dazzling overhead lights illuminate banked beds of ice and vast displays of fish.

It is one of the city's liveliest places, filled with the rolling, background swell of Gaditanos - the citizens of Cadiz - arguing fish and exchanging gossip. Only the cries of the fishmongers are louder.

"It is the best tuna in the world. The Japanese fly it fresh directly to Tokyo," Camilo Fupiani Caballero told me as I watched men in white rubber aprons slicing red tuna steaks tuna with 2ft-long blades.

But it is not the only high-quality fish to be pulled out of local waters, Caballero, a third-generation fish-stall-holder, told me. "We have everything here to make us happy," he boasted. Between the Straits, the brackish estuary of the Guadalquivir River, and the warm, shallow waters of the Bay of Cadiz, he said, this was one of the richest and most varied fishing grounds in Spain.

And so it seemed. I wandered the fish hall, gazing at marine life big and small - gunmetal-grey swordfsh from the Straits; green eels and tiny, transparent, hopping shrimp from the estuary; giant gambas, fat calamars, silvery sardines, red crabs from the bay.

It was all too tempting. How could I see so many fish and not try to taste them all? There was a way. That evening, down by the sea walls in a busy little restaurant, I tucked into a Frito Gaditano - a Cadiz fry-up - a mix of rockfish and sole, sardines and little squid, dorado and rouget, all fried in olive oil and sprinkled with lemon juice.

I was in maritime heaven. It blew English fry-ups, the sort you find on the Costa del Sol, right out of the water.

Did Sir Francis Drake, the English privateer who razed the walls of Cadiz 400 years ago, know of Frito Gaditano, I wondered? I doubted it. If he had, his visit here would have been more profitable.