Botín in Madrid

As we were walking towards Plaza Mayor, Eva took my arm in hers and said, “Do you like cochinillo?”

“I love cochinillo,” I said. And I do. In fact, if you asked me what you should have for dinner on your first night in Madrid, I’d say, “Cochinillo.”

Cochinillo asado—roast suckling pig—is to Castilian Spanish cuisine what lamb is to Greek cuisine or a big ol’ steak is to Texas cuisine (okay, Texas doesn’t have cuisine, but you get my point). In Galicia you get wonderful beef and Barcelona is all about their shellfish, but here in central Castile, with its flat, arid tablelands, it’s all about pigs. Baby pigs.

Now, since we were headed towards Plaza Mayor and Eva said we were going to a restaurant that served suckling pig, I got all excited thinking we were going to Botín. I have never been to Botín but I’ve known about it since I first read Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises when I was a teenager. Botín is where the book’s main character, Jake Barnes, takes Lady Brett Ashley, who he loves but can’t bed because he has no cojones, at the end of the novel. Hemingway writes that Botín is “one of the best restaurants in the world. We had roast young suckling pig and drank rioja alta. Brett did not eat much. She never ate much. I ate a very big meal and drank three bottles of rioja alta.”

Mind you, this is after he and Brett have had three martinis and said “Bung-o!” to each other at the bar in the Palace Hotel before the three bottles of wine at Botín. So Jake eats his suckling pig and drinks three bottles of rioja alta and then asks Lady Brett if she’d like dessert.

“You asked me that once,” Brett said.

“Yes,” I said. “So I did. Let’s have another bottle of rioja alta.”

“It’s very good.”

“You haven’t drunk much of it,” I said.

“I have. You haven’t seen.”

“Let’s get two bottles,” I said. The bottles came. I poured a little in my glass, then a glass for Brett, then filled my glass. We touched glasses.

“Bung-o!” Brett said.

I don’t know. Maybe the bottles of wine were smaller back in the ‘20s.

Anyway, we didn’t go to Botín. We went to another famous old restaurant near the Plaza Mayor also known for their cochinillo, Los Galayos. Probably just as well. I’d never have been able to match the alcohol consumption of Jake and Lady Brett.

Bung-o!