Madrid: Lunch Menu at La Vegana

We had a hectic day of preparation, painting Ricky's room and disassembling furniture and neither of us particularly felt like cooking lunch, so we went out.  We also didn't feel like going very far, so we picked a spot in our neighborhood that we'd been to a couple of times.  It was only a few minutes walk, just up the hill from the Lycee Francais, and it serves traditional Spanish food.

It is called La Vegana, but it is not a vegan, or even a vegetarian, restaurant.  They have three lunch menu options.  A word now, a brief digression, if you will, about the lunch menus of Spain.  Most restaurants in Spain offer a lunch menu.  The traditional Spanish lunch time in the middle of the day is long, and allows time to eat a full meal.  The idea of an hour for lunch is shocking to the Spanish sensibility, and the thought of only a half-hour is, quite simply, beyond the pale.  Most restaurants, therefore, cater to the lunch crowd not by offering some sort of "express meal," where they guarantee that your food is thrown in front of you within five minutes, but by offering a full, fixed price meal of several courses.  These typically include an appetizer, like legumes, a salad or a soup, followed by a main course, followed by dessert or coffee, plus bread and wine (or beer or a soft drink).  These vary in price from the low end of about 8 euros to fancier meals costing twice that.  There are places, of course, where you can spend as much as you want. 

The room is decorated in Restaurant Clutter style, in which every flat surface has been covered with some unusual item, and the walls are hung with interesting, if not obviously related, photos.  There are old typewriters on ledges, sitting next to cigar humidors, with empty beer bottles from years past behind them.  The photos on the wall show scenes of Madrid from 100 years ago, next to old advertisements.  The tables and the chairs are wooden and sturdy.  The staff are attentive and friendly.

I ordered the lentils and chorizo to start with, while Ana got the mixed vegetables.  For the main course, I got the fried breaded cod, while Ana chose the steaks.  A bottle of wine was brought to take table, along with a pitcher of water and a large basket of bread.  The wine which is served with many cheap menus in Madrid is not very good.  The traditional way of drinking such wine is to mix it with casera, a sweet, colorless soda.  I'm not fond of this beverage.  At La Vegana, the wine is fine to drink without such adulteration, which generally improves the spirit of the meal.

A broad, shallow bowl was set before me, and a tureen was brought out.  The waitress spooned lentils in a brown broth into the bowl, and asked if I wanted more chorizo in it.  When the bowl was full, she asked if that was good, and I said it was.  Ana was brought a plate of mixed vegetables had been steamed or boiled.  The lentils and the chorizo were great.  They were like a hot stew, and it was perfect for the cold January weather.  It was filled with the strong flavor of the chorizo, and had a rich smokey taste.  Ana shared it with me, and she liked it, too.  The mixed vegetables were a bit overcooked.

Then the main courses were served.  I had a big piece of cod, fried with a light breading, accompanied by a pile of fried onions and peppers.  Ana had two big, thin slices of steak with french fried potatoes.  The fish was very good.  It was not greasy at all, and it was not overcooked either.  It was fresh and made for a good lunch.  Ana's steaks were still pink inside, despite their thinness which was kind of an impressive achievement.  They had a gravy on them, and they were very good.

A peculiarity of the menu in general (to me) is that it offers dessert or coffee, not both.  I generally would like both, but one must make choices in this life.  Ana and I both chose coffee, because the dessert option was canned pineapple, which did not sound very interesting.  The coffee was very good, though.  It was a great break from the work, and a good meal, and I'm glad we've been to this fine place.

The lunch for two was 19 euros.

La Vegana, c/ Moscatelar, 1-5, Madrid, http://www.laveganademadrid.es/

How We Will Be Traveling.

When we first decided to take this trip, it seemed that the obvious thing to do was to purchase some kind of Round The World ticket. Each of the major airline groups, Star Alliance, Sky Team, and One World, offers a Round The World ticket option, as do some of the carriers themselves. The options offered by the carriers were very cheap, but were not well suited to our plans. For example, Singapore Airlines will sell you a Round The World ticket for as little as $2,266. The routing options, however, are very limited. Almost all their flights have Singapore as one side of their route. Of all the European flights they offer, there are two that do not go straight to Singapore: Frankfort to New York and Moscow to Houston. If you want to go from New York to Frankfort to Singapore to Tokyo to Los Angeles, it's great.

The Star Alliance and the One World websites offer really wonderful planning tools, with the whole world laid out and the destinations from each city made clear, and you can figure out your whole route and then you can get yourself a price. The Sky Team, though, seems to be a bit reluctant to get in on the fun. They tell you to call you local Sky Team airline, and plan it that way. This is a frustrating experience, as you are asked for your prospective itinerary, when you don't really have one set yet, and makes the whole process much more demanding. For those who were not going to use a computer anyway, I suppose it's fine, but for me, it made even tentatively coming up with a Sky Team itinerary unfeasibly difficult.

The way the itineraries work is that you can change your dates of travel, but not your cities. Star Alliance allows you to change your dates for free, up to a day before you are scheduled to travel. The One World group charge you to change ticket dates. I played around with Star Alliance planning site for a long, long time. Days, weeks, months. The costs varied according to where the trip began, and which cities were selected. Children 11 and under are charged 75 percent of the adult price. It was winding up to be somewhere between $13,000 and $16,000, depending on variations, for the three of us.

Then I began to look into buying individual tickets. I had expected that the costs would quickly add up to and surpass the costs of the package ticket. I was surprised to find out that it did not. Most tickets I have purchased in the past have offered stiff penalties for one-way travel, charging the same or more money than for a round trip ticket. For the routes we were looking at, though, this was not the case. The rise of low-cost carriers in many parts of the world have also made the purchase of the Round The World ticket, which is only a choice on the major carriers, less cost effective. With the collapse of the quality of air travel on the major carriers, they have also given up the edge in comfort they once offered over the discount airlines. The first leg of our trip will be from Madrid to Marrakech. Right now a ticket on Ryanair, direct, costs $9. Easyjet is $14. The price on a major airline? Iberia charges $98. Buying our tickets as we go, letting our journey be our guide and inspiration, not only fits better into the spirit we would like to have, but also winds up being significantly cheaper. This, then, will be a trip where the destinations are not known in advance.

Bryan