Rebañar

At 10 pm last night we headed out for dinner. We are trying to get into the rhythm of Spanish life and the rhythm here is in distinct contrast to our Melbourne “clocks”. Though not too dissimilar to Italy, the lateness of the Spanish dinner time is hard to get used to.

Restaurants tend not to open until nine in the evening and even then, nine is considered “tourist early”; locals preferring to eat from ten until midnight. The people we’ve spoken to about it, mostly expats running holiday rentals, tell us it makes much more sense in the summer time, when the sun makes it too hot to eat earlier. We also keep forgetting the 3-4 hour lunch break in the late afternoon, which closes shops and most tourist destinations. I’m sure by the time we figure it all out; it will be time for a new country and a rule book.

Back to last night’s meal. We googled (often problematic, as you sometimes get stuck at tourist traps) and found a restaurant called Bodeguita de Boca. Jerez is a small town, so it didn’t take long to find it. The blurb online said that it was a friendly restaurant run by a mother and son. They weren’t wrong. As we ordered a selection of hot tapas from the menu, our host yelled out “MAMA! CINCO TAPAS CALIENTE!” into the kitchen.

The five tapas we had were, a Spanish omelette with jamón and mushrooms, a rich and tender piece of bull’s tail, a sweet red pepper stuffed with tuna, a melt-in-your-mouth piece of Iberian pork cheek and chicken nuggets. As the son had selected the tapas for us, as he served each one he described in Spanish and one or two English words what they were. As the last was served we looked to him for explanation “nuggets from my mother” he said, we looked at him amused and searching for more information, he simply said “chicken”. Much giggling ensued, both from us and him, not helped by the fact that he repeated the nugget line a few times, just for laughs.

He taught us a new word whilst he cleared the table, rebañar, which means the scraping of the last delicious morsels from a plate or bowl. Putting it into practise we sopped up the last of the hearty sauce that accompanied the pork cheek with slices of thick white bread. Yum.

Xo