Food

We decided to go for another churro hunt, and found this place called Chocolat not far from our hotel. It was delicious - we got a pot of melted chocolate, freshly squeezed orange juice and churros. The churros weren’t fresh ( as in the last 10 mins) but were still tasty. As was the chocolate and orange juice.

We then decided to go for a walk along the Gran Via, one of the main streets/shopping areas and had a look around for a few hours (and escaped the heat in El Cortes Ingles - good aircon).

While getting not quite lost on the way home, we stumbled across the Mercado de San Miguel, which is an iron structure built in 1916 on the place of an old (medieval) open market area. It is full of permanent stands which house fresh produce (fish/beef/jamon/fruit) that also sell these cooked as little tapas. You grab a little bite, a glass of wine, and a table in the central area and stand and eat and people watch. It is actually a lot smaller than I thought it was going to be, but it was good fun.

Here are our mini-hamburgesas they cooked for us.

For dinner we went to La Gabinoteca - which was about a 40 minute walk through some back streets. It was an interesting tapas/restaurant place.

From our seats we could see into the kitchen to see them plating up.

We had some croquettas which were OK.

Then we had some lovely foie gras which looked more like a creme brulee - this was yummy.

We had an empadilla and a bocadillo of calamari which was tasty but a tad salty.

We also shared this thing in a jar - egg, potato and truffle oil. You had to open it, mix it all together and eat - absolutely delcious - creamy, eggy, truffely.

We also shared a hot dog and some toasted bread with capsicum and scallops - which was yummy.

We also shared this lasagne (I thought it was going to be something else).

We had a nice walk home - all the buildings here look awesome during the day and pretty cool at night.