Suckling pig at Los Galayos

This is the thing Madrileño gatos know about dining late: It gives you a rush. One minute you are so tired that all you can think about is going to bed and the next minute you are ordering another bottle of rioja alta (or two) and feel like you could stay up all night. And the conversation that late at night becomes very interesting.

At Los Galayos we ordered olives and jamón Ibérico and talked about what celebrity we’d like to sleep with that we wouldn’t want any of our friends to know about, and then ordered the suckling pig and everyone talked about what celebrity of the same sex they’d like to sleep with. Which, I have to say, was really amazing. The suckling pig, I mean.

This isn’t roast pig as in “stick an apple in its mouth and get two guys to turn it on a spit.” This is a baby pig no more than a month old and weighing no more than 3 kilos (about 6 pounds) that has fed only on mother’s milk and been butterflied and roasted in an open earthenware dish.

That cochinillo was so crazy good that all of us stopped talking and just put our heads down over our plates and ate. When we finished, I said to Eva that the first thing I was going to do when I got back to the hotel was Skype call a friend of mine back in California who is also crazy about suckling pig and describe our meal in fanatical detail.

Eva, whose eyes were starting to glaze over, slowly nodded and then said. “I could never do this.”

“Why not?” I asked her.

She thought about this for a moment and then, pulling herself up straight in her chair, said, “Because Skype is not for Spaniards. We all want to talk at the same time.”

To which I had no reply.