An epicurean expedition through Spain

Our latest food adventure took us quite a ways from home and was originally meant to be a five-day hike, spanning roughly 70 miles from Ferrol, Spain to Santiago de Compostela, Spain. However, with some careful research and planning I was able to turn this into a relaxing and enjoyable walk from hotel to café to restaurant to bar to ice cream shop to hotel.

In late September, four of us flew from San Francisco to Ferrol to take on the Camino de Santiago. The Camino de Santiago is a network of pilgrimage trails across the Iberian Peninsula, all terminating at Santiago de Compostela, in the autonomous community of Galicia.

Although there are multiple Camino routes, ranging from days to months in length, we chose a bite-sized one of just five days because we were limited on time and did not want to overdo it. (Read more about the trekking part of the trip in the Community section of today’s newspaper.)

For us, travel is all about the food. But just like at home, that is deeply tied to the people behind the food and where the food is coming from. We find a lot of common ground when we talk with people about the food they are serving and what and why they do what they do.

Our first Galician meal

We more than made up for the airplane food when we arrived at our Camino’s starting point and settled into an incredible meal at a Michelin-recognized restaurant. We did not start our Camino until the following morning; however, the restaurant is mere steps from our starting point and is aptly named O Camino do Ingles.

Immediately after being seated, the waiter approached with a rolling bar and inquired whether anyone would like to start with a cocktail. We all did, and marveled at the creativity in what we were served. We agreed that a rolling bar cart and pre-dinner cocktail is a great way to start any meal.

Without hesitation, we chose the chef’s menu, which promised an array of dishes that we were told are based in Galician tradition but also have the chef’s signature Asian influences. When the first array of five small dishes showed up at the table, I was fearful that we might go away hungry. Luckily, these were not even really part of the menu, but were simple little somethings to get us started – and boy did they. From haddock tartare to razor clams to bacon and garlic in a nasturtium leaf, we loved them all. The running joke around the table, on this the eve of a five-day hike with untested dining options, was, “I’d carry a bucket of that with us.”

The rest of the meal was just as impressive as the starters and included crab, tuna, anchovy, steak, and the best clam chowder and minestrone soup I have ever had. With multiple desserts to finish out the meal, we were sitting fat and happy and ready to start walking off these calories the next morning. We are also thoroughly impressed with the wines, which were a hand-selected group from both near and far.

The walk begins

We started our walk at what would have been the crack of dawn here at home, but due to their strange time zone in northwest Spain, was somewhere around 8:30 a.m. However, as long as we were already up, we left the hotel and found a couple of nice cafés a block or two along our route. We were so surprised at the low cost of coffee and pastries that I ventured in to a second café to confirm. Six cortados, with complimentary breakfast churros, were only about $7, in part helped by the great exchange rate of roughly $1 to the euro.

It was at this café that I finally saw the beer ferry. In most bars in Spain and Portugal, they have large silver tanks where they store their beer. They serve it on tap, with these large tanks acting as the kegs – except they’re about ten times as large. The mystery of how these tanks get filled was revealed when I saw a man hop out of a beer truck and drag a long hose through the middle of the café and up to the silver tanks. He pumped the beer directly from his small tanker truck into the storage tanks above the bar. And this was just an average size bar/café, if that gives you any indication of the amount of beer they drink.

On the flipside, the beer around these parts is not very good, nor do they know very much about beer. With Spain and Portugal having been run by dictators until the 1970s, beer was historically produced by state-sponsored companies and faced no competition. Not only did they have no reason to improve their product, but quality ingredients were hard to come by and so consumers grew up drinking that one mediocre beer, which they still seem to stick with regardless of what else is available.

Although we had naturally planned to stop for lunch somewhere along the 11 or so miles of our first day, it went by so quickly that we were into our night stop at Pontedeume before we knew it. In fact, we were there early enough to enjoy a large and excellent cup of gelato at Cafeteria Stollen before retiring to our room to shower and nap, before heading out in the late afternoon to the explore the town.

We would again stop in to Stollen because the owner had taken a liking to us, especially when she found out we are from the San Francisco Bay Area. I may have sampled some other gelatos in the area, but Stollen was our favorite by far. That first night we dined at a seafood restaurant, which is just about all you will find in this small fishing village.

Exaggerated hill

Day two started off without coffee or pastries of any kind. The guidebooks had made such a big deal about the hill we would immediately face at the back of town that we wanted to scale it before the sun started heating things up. We had originally planned to lunch in Mino, the town on the other side of the “big” hill, but were quite pleased to be stopping there for breakfast because we were well ahead of schedule due to the guidebooks’ misrepresentation of said hill. We sampled a variety of pastries we had never seen before, along with more coffee, and had a great time trying to communicate with the locals with our broken Spanish and their broken English.

Another relatively short day at just 12 miles, we were again into our destination town of Bentanzos with enough time to find a good restaurant for lunch, and still had time afterward to shower, nap, and explore. My brother-in-law Cenzo was tasked with finding a restaurant for lunch and wisely chose one with a pig on their sign. It turned out to be a great choice. The food was Galician for sure, with Spanish food as a base, such as tortillas (an egg and potato dish) but with a lot of seafood options.

After resting up and finding the obligatory gelato sampling, we stumbled across a great cheese, meat and wine shop where we were able to sample several regional cheeses, wines and the local vermut (vermouth), an elixir the Spanish are fond of and which I found to be a tasty option throughout our trek.

Interestingly enough, when asked what kind of cheese it was, they simply told us whether it was cow, sheep, goat or a mixture of two or three. However, upon further prodding, they then understood that we wanted to know where the cheese came from and what made it different than the rest. Unlike here at home, where a cheesemaker can make whatever styles they want, in a lot of countries there are consortiums that regulate what can be made in a given area, and cheesemakers can make nothing different.

This is why they find it odd when we want to try several versions of the same cheese. To them, it is all the same – but because we here in Petaluma get to enjoy a huge variety of cheeses, we enjoyed getting multiple versions of the same cheese to see if we could taste any differences.

We had more Galician seafood for dinner and learned a valuable lesson about stingray: Do not eat it. The flavor was not bad, but we all agreed that the texture left quite a bit to be desired.

Lots more options

The guidebooks all mention how the third day of the Camino Ingles is shy on food options, but we found quite the contrary, even on a Sunday in a Catholic country. Two of us had stocked our packs with snacks in anticipation of the starving walk, but I was confident, based on a lot of online research, that we would be fine.

As it turns out, we were more than fine, coming across our first café within just a couple of miles, and following that up with an excellent lunch of hardy sandwiches at the “Camino Museum,” only to find a casual steak restaurant a few more miles after that.

By the time we finally arrived at the bar in O Meson do Vento where we were to retrieve our room keys for the night, we were pretty stuffed. But that did not stop the bartender from forcing us to try some of their handmade chorizo and bread.

After a few hours of resting up, we figured we better grab something for dinner because we had a big day ahead of us. Unfortunately, there was only one restaurant open in town and it was downright mediocre. This turned out to be our only bad meal of the trip.

We got walking first thing in the morning, and happily found a roadside café within just a few miles where we enjoyed coffee and pastries. With no real concept of time, lunch came up quite quickly as we found another roadside café that seemed to be making great sandwiches. Oddly enough, the proprietor was originally from England, which is not generally known for great food, but she put together a heck of a sandwich. There were even some veggies involved, which is a rarity in Spain.

We stopped for the night in Sigueiro, just 11 miles short of our destination. We went a bit off course by ordering some pasta and pizza for dinner, but both were some of the best any of us could remember. Or could it be the long days of hiking caused our palette to crave carbs? We also enjoyed four excellent desserts from a menu that had at least ten times more options, but alas, this was the only time we had gelato that day.

Gelato and wine

One of my brothers-in-law has a similar sweet tooth to me, so never balked at stopping along our route for gelato. Luckily, the other is a fan of wine, and what with every bar, café and gelatoria also selling wine, he was just as happy to stop too.

Our final day started with some fresh fruit, as it was apple season and tradition holds that any low-hanging fruit is available for pilgrims along the Camino to glean. Of course, there was a stop or two for coffee, pastries and gelato, but we were planning on having a nice lunch after completing our Camino, so hightailed it into Santiago de Compostela in time to get our Camino certificates and make our lunch reservation.

Our final meal was at O Curro da Parra and was on par with some of the best meals we have enjoyed in Spain. After sampling the local vermut, we started with a cheese platter with several local varieties, and then moved into delicacies such as tuna crudo, beans in squid ink, and short rib raviolis. Topping it all off, and ending on a high note, we were treated to two different house-made ice cream desserts.

To say we ate well during our five-day walk across Galicia would be an understatement. Nearly everywhere we went, the food was plentiful and delicious. We tasted a lot of new flavors, but definitely got into the Galicia groove, which revolves around seafood.

Needless to say, even walking 70 miles in five days was not enough to shed weight. The human body is an efficient walker, and the 1,500 or so calories we burned each day were easily replaced by all the café and bar stops along the way, as well as the excellent dinners each night.