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By Root 716 0

baby octopus salad, roasted red and yellow peppers, codfish fritters, marinated olives, langoustines, pink-red fat-rippled serrano, pata negra and Bayonne ham, stuffed chilis, squid, tarts, empanadas, brochettes, salads – and the most awesome, intimidatingly beautiful mountain range of fresh wild mushrooms: gorgeous custard-yellow chanterelles and hedgehogs, earth-toned cèpes, morels, black trumpets. Cooks seared them to order in black pressed-steel pans and the room was filled with the smell of them. Visi cut me off before I started blindly eating everything in sight; she conferred with the cooks for a moment while a bartender poured us small glasses of red wine. A few moments later, I had a pungent mound of searingly hot sautéed wild mushrooms in front of me, crispy, golden brown, black and yellow, with a single raw egg yolk slowly losing its shape in the center. After a toast of red wine, I ran my fork around the plate, mingling yolk and fungi, then put a big forkful in my mouth. I can only describe the experience as ‘ready to die’ – one of those times when if suddenly and unexpectedly shot, at that precise moment you would, in your last moments of consciousness, know that you had had a full and satisfying life, that in your final moments, at least you had eaten well, truly well, that you could hardly have eaten better. You’d be ready to die. This state of gustatory rapture was interrupted by more wine, a tiny plate of tantalizing baby octopus, and a few sexy-looking anchovies. I was at first confused by an offer of what looked to be a plate of fried zucchini sticks, but when I bit inside and found tender white asparagus, I nearly swooned.

‘Let’s go,’ said one of the girls, tearing me away from a long, lingering look at all that ham. ‘Next place is famous for fish cakes.’ We walked six abreast down the cobblestone streets, the girls laughing and joking – already best pals with my wife – who speaks no Spanish and certainly no Basque. I felt like part of the James/Younger gang. At the next joint, Luis’s former student recognized me from the street, entered, took one look at the female desperadoes I was keeping company with, and bolted immediately from the premises, badly outnumbered.

‘This place is famous for hot food – especially the fish cakes. You see? Nothing on the bar. Everything here is made to order in the kitchen,’ said Visi. We drank more red wine while we waited for the food. I was soon digging into a hot, fluffy fish cake of bacalao, onions, and peppers, smeared onto a crust of bread, followed by the even better morro, a braised beef cheek in a dark expertly reduced demiglace. Yes, yes, I was thinking. This is the way to live, perfect for my short attention span. I could easily imagine doing this with chef friends in New York, ricocheting from tapas bar to tapas bar, drinking and eating and eating and drinking, terrorizing one place after another. If only New York had an entire neighborhood of tapas bars. The whole idea of the poteo wouldn’t work if you had to take a cab from place to place. And the idea of sitting down at a table for pinchos, having to endure a waiter, napkins, a prolonged experience, seems all wrong.

Another joint, then another, the red wine flowing, the girls getting looser and louder. I don’t know how one would translate ‘Uh-oh, here comes trouble,’ but I’m sure we heard it in our rounds as our crew swept into one tiny bar after another. I remember anchovies marinated in olive oil, tomato, onion, and parsley, cured anchovies, grilled anchovies, fried sardines, a festival of small tasty fish. More wine, more toasts. I recall stumbling through an old square that had once been a city bullring, apartments now overlooking the empty space. Past old churches, up cobblestone steps, down others, lost in a whirlwind of food.

At San Telino, a modern, more upscale place (inside an old, old building), I found a more nouvelle take on pinchos. Wine was poured as soon as we entered. I had, I recall, a spectacular slab of pan-seared foie gras with mushrooms – and, glory of glories, a single squid stuffed