Tapeando

As many of you are well aware, Spain is famous for it’s tapas.  Tapas are appetizer size portions of traditional Spanish dishes, so a meal is usually a bunch of tapas shared by the table.  Conveniently, the Spanish language even made Tapas into a verb “tapear”, therefore, when people go out to eat tapas, they are “tapeando”. 

So last weekend, my friend Alex and I went “tapeando” since her host family wasn’t home to make dinner.  We decided to eat at “100 montaditos” which translates to 100 sandwiches.  The menu is exactly that: 100 sandwiches. 

Thinking that one sandwich would be enough for dinner, Alex and I placed our order.  After about 20 minutes, our order was called.  Alex went to get our food but came back with a bite-sized sandwich.  I mean the sandwich on my plate could not have been any bigger than my pinky finger.  I looked at it, wondering how I should eat it.  One bite? Or two?  I went with two, but I was completely unsatisfied.  I would need at least three pinky-sized sandwiches to consider it a meal.  But rather than place another order to wait 20 minutes for another two-bite sandwich, Alex and I decided to continue our “tapeando” elsewhere.

We walked through the old city, trying to find a cute little tapas bar, but the more we wandered, the more discouraged we got.  At one point we even abandoned our search to go to a candy store instead, but it was closed.  A sign, for sure.  So tapeando we went. 

We got to a busy street with many restaurants and stopped to look at the menu.  At the second restaurant a waiter practically picked us up and ushered us inside to his restaurant.  Alex and I didn’t know what to do other than follow his orders.  The only way for us to leave at that point was to turn around and literally push him out of the way.  So we went upstairs when he told us to go upstairs. 

The first warning should have been the white tablecloth.  But downstairs didn’t have white tablecloths.  Then we realized that upstairs and downstairs were different restaurants.  Of course we were herded upstairs.  We ordered a bottle of water and looked over the menu in panic.  The cheapest thing on the menu was 15 euros!  This was not a tapas bar.  I looked over at another table, where six older Spanish women sat in heels and (obnoxious) fur coats, while drinking their wine and buttering their bread.  This was not the kind of place that Alex and I were supposed to be at.  I wish the candy store actually had been open!

Alex and I decided it would be better to split something on the menu.  After reading everything but the entrees twice (they ranged from 25-40 euros), we settled on a cheese platter.  The waiter seemed a little surprised when we said we would only like to split the cheapest appetizer, but it was his fault we were there anyway. 

He came back with our cheese platter, but a more accurate description would be a plate of cheese.  There wasn’t an array of cheese, no, no.  This was a plate of one kind of cheese.  Literally about 15 slices of Manchego cheese.  We weren’t even given any bread until we asked for it (and charged for it, of course).  Nevertheless, we ate every single crumb off that plate.  If we were going to pay 12.80 Euros for cheese, we were going to get our full 12.80 Euros’ worth!

The final bill was 16.80 Euros, including the bread and water, and the waiter got not a penny more.  We were just robbed.  The restaurant robbed us of almost 17 euros! We could have had 17 little sandwiches for a plate of cheese.  Lesson learned: get the six-sandwich platter, and stay away from herding waiters and white tablecloths.