The best thing I ate in Madrid was a cuttlefish roll, and I only ordered it because I'd spent the previous week writing about how we catch cuttlefish off the south coast and then send almost all of it to Spain.
There it was. On a bread roll. In Spain. Eleven Euros, and very good.
I'll come back to that. First, how we ended up there at all.
The maths
My daughter Evie wanted to see The Weeknd. Properly wanted it: bucket list, counting down, the works. By the time I looked, the UK dates were resale only and the prices were what resale prices always are.
So I did the sum that any parent of a teenager will recognise. Tickets and a hotel in Madrid came to the same as the resale tickets alone in the UK. The only gap was the flights, and I'd been quietly building up Avios points on a credit card for a couple of years without having anything to spend them on.
I spent a genuinely unreasonable amount of time checking out airplane model seating configurations and picking flights accordingly, because on certain aircraft European business class means a proper seat with its own pod, and on the rest it means an economy seat with the middle one left empty. I found a flight with the good plane. About a month before we travelled, they swapped the aircraft anyway. Bastards.
So: economy seats with a bit of elbow room, food and drink included, and the lounge beforehand. I'm not going to pretend that's a hardship.
These trips matter more than they sound. We don't go abroad as a family, because Polly's medical needs make it more complicated than it's worth. So once or twice a year it's me and Evie, somewhere, briefly. I'd love my wife to do one too, but she has no interest in being away from home, and the best I can manage is packing her off to a spa morning or a show with Evie instead. One of us has to be at home so it's always Evie+1. Lucky old Evie.
In praise of aeroplane food
I have a weakness I'm not going to apologise for. I really like airplane food.
The little bread roll. The little pudding in its little pot. I don't think I've ever been handed a main course on a plane that I didn't enjoy, which probably says more about my tolerance for processed food than it does about the airlines.
On the way out it was baked cod with potatoes, and it was genuinely nice. I didn't need it, having already had breakfast in the lounge, but we'd paid for it in points and I had a strong suspicion it might be the last proper thing I ate that day. Reader, it was.
I'd also woken up with the feeling that something was coming. Not ill exactly. Just the sense of a door being slowly opened somewhere at the back of things. I took a couple of paracetamol and said nothing, because Evie had been vibrating with excitement for weeks and I wasn't about to put a dent in it.
Race Across the World, sort of
Evie and I have a running fantasy about going on Race Across the World, so when we travel we like to test how we'd do. Given that we use our phones constantly, this is already nonsense. In practice it means taking public transport instead of a taxi.
The taxi queue at the airport was enormous, so we got on a bus feeling extremely pleased with ourselves, got off exactly where the internet told us to, looked around, realised we had no idea where we were, and ordered an Uber for the last couple of miles to the hotel anyway.
In our defence it was 34 degrees. We would not win Race Across the World.
Being fifty at a pop concert
I turned fifty last month. I thought the bowel cancer screening kit that arrived within days of my birthday was the low point of that experience. Then I walked around the outside of the Metropolitano looking for our entrance.
Thousands of teenagers and twenty-somethings, immaculately dressed, hair done, glitter on. One of them was my daughter. And there was me, in shorts, a t-shirt and trainers, carrying the bag.
Inside, we were thirsty and fancied something to eat, and the food stand had a picture of tequeños: golden pastry rolls with melted cheese oozing out of the ends. Sausage rolls, basically, but cheese. We ordered immediately.
What arrived at our seats, once we opened the bag, was a row of cold pale objects that looked unnervingly like fingers, with a rubbery white cord running through the middle where the molten cheese was supposed to be. Not warm. Not oozing. Not, on any reasonable reading, the picture.
I ate two out of pure stubbornness, because I refuse to be beaten by a pastry finger, and binned the rest.
The concert, I should say, was excellent. Better than I expected, and worth every bit of the journey for the look on Evie's face. Afterwards we walked back hoping to find something to eat, found nothing open that appealed, and had a sandwich and a Coke from the hotel vending machine.
A food writer's day, that. Cod on a plane, two cold pastry fingers and a vending machine sandwich.
The Mercado de San Miguel
The next morning is why I'm writing this.
We had a light hotel breakfast, because it was free and I have never once walked past a free breakfast, then took a taxi to the Plaza Mayor. Big handsome square, arcades all the way round, and on the day we were there a market selling old coins and medals from stalls along the edges. Cafés and shops worth an hour on their own.
But I had one target, and it was next door.
The Mercado de San Miguel is an indoor market, all iron and glass, and it sells lunch. Not ingredients for lunch. Lunch. Stall after stall of it, and you wander between them assembling a meal from whatever catches you.
I was in heaven and my body had picked a terrible morning to give up on me. That feeling from the day before had grown into something with opinions, and my appetite was not what it should have been. I did my best.
Something from the bacalao stall, salt cod being one of the great Spanish obsessions. King crab for twenty euros, which sounds steep and was worth every cent. And the cuttlefish roll, which I absolutely did not need and ordered anyway, because you cannot spend a week writing about British boats sending cuttlefish to Spain and then decline to eat it when you're standing in Spain.
Almost everything arrives on bread of some kind. A slice of toast, a piece of baguette, a soft roll. It's a system, and it works, and it means you can eat six things without sitting down.
Evie went straight for the mozzarella stall and stayed there.
I'd have happily gone back three days running and eaten something different each time. I've not found anything quite like it in the UK. The closest I've been to it is the Time Out Market in Lisbon, which is the same idea and equally good, and both have plenty to drink, so you could take friends to either in the evening and have a wonderful time. One day.
I filmed the whole thing, stall by stall, and it's on our Instagram if you want to see what I'm talking about.
Finding churros with my own website
Afterwards, an experiment.
The search on myfoody works anywhere in the world. I don't advertise that, because the site runs on tips from people who've actually been somewhere, and I've got quite enough to do getting that working in Britain first. But we were in Madrid, we wanted churros, and I wanted to see what would happen.
So we told it where we were, told it what we were after, and hit search. No tips, obviously, so we picked one with a good Google score and a look we liked, tapped the directions button, and set off through the midday heat.
It was the jackpot. Chocolatería 1902, on Calle de San Martín, run by the same family since 1902 and now in the hands of the fifth generation of churreros. They say they are the oldest churro-making family in Spain, and the business began with the current owner's great-grandfather selling churros and porras on the streets of Madrid from a burner he built himself. Downstairs there is a glass wall beside the till where you can stand and watch the dough go in and the churros come out.
We ordered porras rather than churros, to be different. Same batter, but much fatter and chunkier, and very good indeed. Evie complained about the chocolate, as she always does, on the grounds that it wasn't sweet enough — she is a Cadbury's loyalist and anything darker or more serious is treated as an insult. She still put one away. So did I, along with a frozen lemonade that was the single most welcome thing I consumed on the entire trip.
There is something quietly satisfying about the tool you built finding you something good in a city you don't know. That's the whole idea, in one small foreign test.
Home
We walked off the sugar around a few more sights, picked up souvenirs for my wife, for Polly and for my mum, and went back to the airport.
The lounge had free food, and it looked good, and I couldn't face any of it. Same with the meal on the flight home, which I poked at gently and gave up on. By the time we landed I was properly ill, and I went straight into the spare room, because Polly is immunosuppressed and we don't take chances when we don't have to.
Worth it, though. All of it.
If you're ever in Madrid, give the Mercado de San Miguel a couple of hours. Go hungry, eat six small things, and don't be like me and arrive with a cold coming on.
And if you have to sit through a stadium holding sixty thousand screaming teenagers to get there, so be it. One of them might be yours.
Want to find real, local cuttlefish or landed catch near you? Search UK fishmongers on myfoody →