tapas or not tapas

for all our whinging about being broke, having to pay to tour, etc., sometimes, for no particular reason, we're compelled to spend stupid amounts of money on food. i know other bands who do the same thing, and i don't think there should be much shame in it. artists are supposed to be self-destructive--i* just prefer to destroy myself with tapenade rather, than, say cocaine. call me an arsehole; hey, i'll call you an arsehole.

so here we are in portland, oregon, more or less fresh from the plane and as yet without the wallet-lightening that will soon suck our sanity dry. portland, oregon (can it be said any other way?) is undoubtedly an expensive place, grown from hard graft and infused with the scents of hemp and vanilla frappes--a privileged but pleasant two-tone hippydom awash with plaid shirts, fixed gear bikes, and tattoos learing from limb after limb. i love it.

it's also a food place. "food places" are defined, by me, as places so full of food that they soon become about food. truck stops on ohio interstates are, not, for example, food places, whereas the poncy half of new york city quite clearly is. generally speaking you'd think america would be one big food place, given how enormous everyone is--but of course it doesn't work like that. in fact, nothing works like this at all: the fundamental thing about my insightful theory of "food places" being that it's utter bullshit. ba dum ... tsssh, etc.

so, right next to the venue in portland sits this tapas restaurant toro bravo. it has a great reputation, apparently. jack did his usual tripadvisor-based research, and came back with some such statistic about how 107% people agree that it is indeed the pinnacle of culinary good-time party vibes, and how it serves 300 different riojas, and how it once famously poisoned franco himself, blah blah blah.

i wasn't hungry, having eaten an enormous pulled pork sandwich recently around 100 yards down the road. it had been delicious, sort of, in a way, kind of like a snickers chocolate bar is delicious, or a simple mouthful of whipped cream is... --i.e., okay, if you plan to die before your thirties, or at least never progress to mental adulthood, but not exactly my cup of tea.


the menu, long and thin, teases with plentitude: rarely are words more god-damn om-nom-nom than in places like this: pecorino and pomegranate; romesco and romaine; salbitxada and... what even is sabitxada? of course, there's no explanation--and, of course, nothing as crassly mercantile as dollar signs.

so. what's the no. 1 rule of dining at a spanish restaurant. that's right: always drink the sherry. i've only ever drunk sherry at tapas restaurants (approximately as many times as i have left-handed fingers), and with that depth of experience i can assuredly tell you that it is deee-licious. all of it! even the cheap stuff.

get on the sherry traaaain! choo-choo...

this assuredly was cheap stuff. at $12 for the three, and listed as a "sherry flight", i was easily seduced.

what, you wonder, is a sherry flight? well, it brings to mind a proto-plane enthusiastically plummeting over the white cliffs of the dover, spilling with sherry-doused dowagers, headmistresses, and aging suffragettes. that's a good thing, right? right.

i'd like to think the sherry actually gives you wings, as the complementary plank is about as long as a second-rate aircraft carrier and could, in itself, barely provide any kind of run-up for take-off. maybe that's the point: maybe you're supposed to down them with all the spirit of a ww2 pacific-theatre pilot, seconds from shooting haphazardly off into the horizon. either way, the energy conjured up is on of swift, focused action. 1-2-3... go, so to speak.

instead i drank them slow, expecting the same kind of slow seeping satisfaction that i've felt in london's brindisa and polpo. but they just, mm, sliipped down. i guess this is because they were all pretty shit. but with a cute little plank and a graded colour system who could possibly complain?

the no. 2 rule of spanish restaurants, taught me by my favourite sort-of spanish associate "melquin", is that you should always order spinach. in fact this rule goes for most restaurants. spinach is extraordinarily nutritious, and it costs nothing, and it makes everything look good. the vitamin-bling of vegetables; the kerrrching-aling of vegetables; the motherluvvin' king of vegetables.

i think those might be pine nuts. i can't remember. i was still too excited about the flying sherry train.

rule no. 3? nah, this isn't a rule. i just ordered a salad because i wasn't very hungry.

raddichio is good, right? there was something else in there: manchego vinaigrette! as if i could hide from he stuff. it turned out to be about three times as big as my head, and i put it all away. banging.

the real rule no. 3 is: always order the weird cheese. we've all had manchego and ... and... the others. right. some of the others. they're boring! throw caution to the wind: order the pickled pig's cheese smoked in the fires of sodom. or in this case, the marinaded sheep's cheese with rose petal harissa and mint.

globules of "good god!" gobbiness. but what the fuck is rose petal harissa? god knows. it tasted really weird, and i'm not sure i dug it. i'm definitely unsure that it sat with the sherry. but boy was i flying high, and so, belly more or less sated, i went on to this drink:

unfortunately i can't remember what it is. the receipt just says BESITO in big beaming letters. be... sito. i'm guessing, looking at it, that it was some kind of sour. i'm around 50% confident that i ordered it solely because there was some odd vaguely- ingredient in it. er, sherry? a sherry sour? that or it was the horchato-based white russian that i've recently been craving. either way, it was probably quite nice.

and dessert? well, that was balls.

nah, not really. it was brilliant. a sort of affogato (pronounced "ah, fer garrdo..." in the australian style) with espresso-drowned almond ice-cream, it ... it... i dunno. it was just ice-cream, basically.

what else? there were some salted almonds. jack had some grilled asparagus. there was a sausage served with fries that will remain unfeatured. someone who shall remain unnamed had about eleven beers. there was mutinous talk of foie gras, and much silent slurping.

of course the main drawback of going to a tapas restaurant with more than just your closest confidant is that you can't rely on everyone's sense of adventure to make group-orders worthwhile. in our case this is definitely true. jimmy just wants chorizo; walter won't eat fish; jack only wants the bloody potato bravas. and so what could be a feast of much becomes a tight-fist of not-much. and where ten plates should sit and deferentially complement each other, we're left overthinking the three of four we've individually chosen. this is a shame because it's not how these restaurants are supposed to work, and inevitably we went away with a limited experience.

but i'm not whinging, though. not me, no--not ever.

*... am an artist here for rhetorical purposes only.