Colombian Spanish fusion food in Granada.
What's not to like?
* * *
Much of the food was simple well executed stuff.
A nice salmon on the plancha.
A nice salad.
Pineapple juice comes out of the bottle.
But the bottle is a Spanish bottle,
The pineapples are Spanish pineapples,
And the Juice is served with ice cubes.
On a 110 degree day,
Good pineapple juice on the rocks was just what I needed.
I drank a lot of the stuff.
* * *
The dish of distinction was the shrimp coquetel.
Mexicans do lots of coquetels.
I eat a ton of these back in Texas where I live.
This Colombian-Spanish coquetel put my hometown coquetels to shame.
It doesn't hurt that Spanish seafood is just better stuff than commercial Gulf of Mexico seafood.
Good shrimp are good shrimp.
But what made the dish magical is that the coquetel sauce was much more acidic than are comparable versions in the United States.
You did not hear me say "lemony" or "citrusy".
If you had said "mild vinegar" I might have believed you.
The tart bite made the dish incredibly refreshing.
Normally on a seafood cocktail, I am there for the shrimp and the sauce is garnish.
Here, as good as the shrimp were - and they were good, the shrimp were the back-up band for the sauce.
The sauce put life back into my body and hope back into my heart.
It may have been 110 degrees outside -
But I was ready for five sets of tennis ...
Or maybe walking up to the Alhambra on my thumbs while juggling watermelons with my feet.
I don't think they put Red Bull in coquetel sauces anywhere.
But this was food that was truly reviving.
* * *
Minor note:
Dessert was popsicles.
Popsicles in Spain are strictly commercial - although artisanal ones do exist.
They are thin rectangles of actual fruit on the stick with juice and flavors in the ice on the outside.
We had one green mango popsicle and one tutti-frutti popsicle.
I would have never thought I would be happy eating a commercial popsicle
Rather than getting a chef-made kitchen-made dessert.
But some popsicles are really good. read more