Dining with the Sorcerer’s Apprentice

I’ve got this friend in Madrid, Lisa Abend, who knows pretty much everything there is to know about Spanish cuisine (she wrote a fascinating “behind the scenes” book on the chef Ferran Adriàs of elBulli fame titled The Sorcerer’s Apprentices). Lisa came to Spain for a sabbatical like eight or nine years ago and never went home. As she likes to say, “In a previous life I was a professor of Spanish history at Oberlin College.” Now she goes to Pamplona for the running of the bulls (she hates bullfights), writes about Spanish gypsies, and hangs out with Ferran. I think she’s also the best travel writer I know.

Anyway, I called Lisa up yesterday and asked her if she wanted to have dinner together. “Sure,” she said. “What time?”

“Maybe 7:30 or 8?”

She laughed. “You’re joking, right?”

She tells me what I already know: No one in Madrid dines before ten.

So we decide to compromise and agree to meet at Taberna Los Huevos de Lucio, a popular tapa bar on an old narrow street in the center of the city, around nine. When I get there, she is sitting at the bar. An empty bar.

“Where is everybody?” I say.

“I told you—too early.”

This eating late at night thing is going to take some getting used to.