Grape, Olive, Pig

How this book was born

Dear Tony,

I went out last night for a quick drink down the road—cold, dark vermouth from a dim bodega in the shadow of an ancient church. A friend showed up with the promise of the best croquetas in town (he was right: the crunch of a chicharrón, the molten savory flow of jamón lava). The night marched on—from oil-slick anchovies to pimenton-dusted octopus, small tubes of cerveza to big bellies of Beefeater—as my plans to return to work vanished in a slipstream of crushed grapes and pork fat. I woke up to a half-eaten shawarma on the bed stand and a note scribbled on a napkin: “Great Ball of Pig? Grape. Olive. Pig.”

The most common reaction to Rice, Noodle, Fish, our love letter to Japanese cuisine, has been three words long: “I am going.” That’s what we set out to do—inspire and contextualize travel while leaving readers room to make their own discoveries. But now that we have a look, a style, a voice, it would be a damn shame not to take it to another delicious corner of the world. And I think I have just the place.

“We changed the history of the world,” a chorizo-cheeked chef once told me in Madrid. Maybe it was the gin talking, but he had a point. The Spaniards brought tomatoes and chocolate and chilies to the Old World, sugar and wheat and smallpox to the New World. They forged one of the world’s first fusion cuisines—not fusion as a six-letter word, but a cuisine of confluence, where the slow tide of Phoenicians and Romans, Jews and Moors and Catholics washing over the Iberian Peninsula gently but resolutely shaped its character. Like the sting of a Padrón pepper, it creeps up on you gently: in the hint of cinnamon in grandma’s meatballs or the stain of saffron in a proper paella. More a whisper than a full-throated pronouncement.

Not that the Spaniards don’t know how to shout. After all, this is the country that invented foams and spheres and the forty-course tasting menu. But Spain’s greatest virtue lies in that time-tested Mediterranean formula: beautiful local ingredients, impeccable technique, and a ravenous appetite for all manners of flora and fauna. The Spaniards suck the brains from shrimp heads, crunch sardine spines like potato chips, throw elaborate wine-soaked parties to celebrate spring onions. There are stories to tell here.

From what I’ve heard in our conversations, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Food that will make your toes curl. People you want to name your children after. The fact that we first met over roasted snails and cava in the Catalan countryside brings this thing full circle.

We’d go with the same squad from Roads & Kingdoms: Doug Hughmanick painting with pixels, Nathan Thornburgh flexing from the edit desk. And assuming those nice folks down on Broadway dig on canned seafood and blood sausage, Harper Wave putting the ink to paper. What do you think?

Saludos,

Matt

Dear Matt,

So, it’s the end of an epic meal in Andalusia, as so many in Spain seem to be, and I’m sitting at the table, enjoying a few moments of woozy happiness when the chefs emerge from the kitchen and join me. They are friendly, but strangely . . . wary.

“You know, señor Anthony, that we in Spain like you very much. We like your book. We like your shows . . .” There was an uncomfortable silence as I waited for the “but” that seemed sure to follow. “. . . but people say things. Here in Andalusia, in Madrid, they say you are close . . . TOO close to the Basques.”

Which is, of course, kind of true. My first and closest connections to Spain came through the great Basque chefs Juan Mari Arzak and his daughter, Elena. It was culinary educator Luis Irizar and his daughters who first led me, stumbling through the nighttime streets of San Sebastián, eating wonderful things unlike anything I’d experienced before. Juan Mari has since become as close to a father to me as anyone since my dad passed. The phone still rings late at night and it’s him, the two of us struggling in our broken French and Spanish to communicate but somehow always managing.

And of course, the equally obstinate Catalans grabbed hold of my heart early and often. Ferran and Albert Adrià making it their personal mission to show me how good, how insanely good, ham could be. How stuff that came in a can could be divine. Showed me—as they showed the world—the glorious extremes of human creativity. It’s not that I loved the South of Spain any less. It’s just that I came late to the party.

Spain, for me, is a country of grown-ups. When I’m asked where I’d like to die—specifically at what table—I always picture myself in Spain, sagging to the ground with a blissful expression on my face at Etxebarri, an austere yet revelational restaurant in the mountains near San Sebastián where most dishes have only three ingredients: the principal protein (a single perfect prawn, a spoonful of fish eggs, a slab of exceptional beef), olive oil, and salt.

It’s fitting that you choose Spain to follow Rice, Noodle, Fish. There are, I’ve long believed, similarities between the two countries and their approaches to food: the embrace of single ingredients done as well as possible, the love of tradition, the mania for great seafood. The “poteo,” that uniquely awesome bar crawl, bouncing from place to place, scooping delicious, delicious things into your mouth between glasses of wine: wild mushrooms, little plates of slow-braised cheek, slices of acorn-scented, fat-rippled ham, ridiculously tiny sea cucumbers, squid and octopus seared on the plancha . . . grilled turbot . . . slow-cooked tripe with hunks of chorizo. . . . Going out to eat dinner at midnight. Think about Spain and the mind reels.

You could hardly pick a better place to eat, to write about, to die.

Cheers,

Tony

Dear Tony,

Like you, my love for Spain was born in the north. It struck first in Barcelona—eighteen years old and goose-bumped by everything that passed before my eyes. Later, I fell in with the Basques, learned the art of pilpil and pintxos crawls at the hands of Luis and Visi Irizar. Finally, I found a more permanent solution to my courtship with this country: I fell hard for a Catalan girl and somehow convinced her to marry me.

I’ve called Barcelona home since 2010, and I’ve used the years since to roam the peninsula like an Iberian pig in search of fallen acorns. I’ve eaten baby goat with the horsemen of Andalusia, crushed sea urchin in the cider houses of Asturias, scraped socarrat from paella pans with the abuelas of Alicante. My appetite for this country knows no one taste or territory.

Make no mistake, this ain’t Japan. I can’t hide behind my gaijin status here. I married into this country and claim to understand its cuisine. At the very least, I’ve consumed enough calories over the years that I’d be a knucklehead not to have learned something along the way.

The book I’m thinking about is a more personal, intimate book than Japan. To write it any other way would be to ignore the role my family and friends have played in shaping my understanding of this country and its people. Here, I am part insider, part outsider—a position not without its possible perils, but maybe it gives me something to say.

These are well-traveled grounds I traverse. The titans of the Wandering Scribes’ Club—Dumas, Orwell, Papa—have been peddling their opinions on Spain for centuries. More than the foreign contingent, though, the Spaniards claim a long tradition of heavyweight epicures who wield their pens as voraciously as their forks. Néstor Luján, Simone Ortega, José Carlos Capel—men and women with big thoughts about food and huge footprints in the kitchens across Spain. All of this is to say that I would be wise not to fuck this up.

Luckily I’ve had a lot of really smart people along the way to guide me to the good stuff. Rice masters. Fish whisperers. The brothers Adrià. My in-laws. Your buddy José Andrés has been my most trusted consigliere on all matters of the stomach. He cracked open in me a wide and wonderful curiosity for Spain many years ago, which I’ve been probing ever since.

More than specific restaurants or dishes, it’s the people and the stories behind the food that I want to build this book around. A pack of sisters who brave the elements to scrape gooseneck barnacles from the cracks and crevices of the Galician coast. A band of fishermen off the coast of Cádiz who maintain the world’s oldest fish hunt. And in the sunbaked mountains near Granada, in the cave community of Fuente Nueva, my wife’s eighty-seven-year-old great uncle, Chacho Federo, the last of a dying breed of Andalusian shepherds.

I’ve been pocketing these stories for years, saving them in the dank bodega of my mind like a bottle of ’74 Vega Sicilia, waiting for the right moment to decant and drink. Now’s the time.

Un abrazo,

Matt

Matt,

Might I respond to your last with a resounding “Fuck You!”

You got me beat. By a mile. No matter how much I love Spain, no matter how many friends I think I have, however well connected I thought I was, how sincere my love for the food, the lifestyle . . . you’ve got me beat. By a mile.

You fucking LIVE in Barcelona. Who doesn’t want to live in Barcelona? You had the good sense to marry a Spaniard—which means, in my limited experience, that you often come home to find an ibérico ham casually deposited on the kitchen counter next to a knife. You are on close terms with Juan at that incredible counter in the Boqueria. You go out to dinner at midnight, start drinking again at noon, nap around three, nibble on olives and little bites of awesomeness when you rise, and pretty much live the dream.

So, yeah, fuck you, Matt. I hope the next Roads & Kingdoms book is on Orlando.

Suerte,

Tony