Food, tied to place, is a great rarity in America. We have a national cuisine, but increasingly that national cusine is, in fact, what is America - an amalgam of cultures, tastes, and approaches. This is good, certainly, but it comes at a price. That price is paid every time you suffer through chow mein, through chicken tender kebabs, through spaghetti with meatballs, through nachos or fajitas, or any other number of culinary atrocities committed in the name of making the world acceptable to the American palate. That same palate, nurtured under the paternalistic eye of a government that would rather feed its people beef mixed with illegal meat packer than unpasteurized cheese, is utterly unprepared to eat food that is about something.

Spain is a start.

Food, tied to a place, is about something. And the food in Spain, still, is about something. Of course there are the ubiquitous McDonald’s (although thankfully not as ubiquitous as they might be), and there is - completely inexplicably - Starbucks, but there is also an enormous care for the food and the meal. At least for now, that is the greatness of Spain, and my most enduring reason to tell other to go. Quickly.

For an American, eating in Madrid is an athletic endeavor. It’s not a matter of quantity (except in the aggregate sense), it’s the sheer frequency that threatens to exhaust all but the most fevered and dedicated eaters. One doesn’t have to eat six times a day. Indeed, no. But, you’ll want to. Hence…the pretapas tapas.

Designed to hold you over between your lunch of bean stew, lamb, bread, a bottle of wine, desert, and a coffee and your inevitable pilgrimage to the tapas bars, the pretapas tapas can be had anytime after five or six in the afternoon (Madrid time). Best choices are something with a little substance, both to keep you from getting peckish and as a way to ward off the effects of the two bottles of wine you’re likely to enjoy over the next eight hours.

Here we have jamon (of course) on toasted bread with a drizzle of olive oil, and anchovies with tomatoes (also on bread with a drizzle of olive oil).

Permit me to introduce you, dear reader, to Casa Patas.

Me: Dear reader, meet Casa Patas

Me: Casa Patas, meet dear reader

Case Patas: I have a 9 euro menu el dia that includes a bottle of wine, four courses, coffee, and great people watching. Oh, and I’m the premier flamenco spot in the Madrid.

Dear reader (you): drooooool

Yep, trust me, that is exactly how it would go. There might be a little more drooling than that, or perhaps even stronger exclamations of wonder. But, you get the gist.

Daily menus are commonplace in Madrid, indeed in many European cities. Designed, in their best incarnations, as a way for the restaurant to showcase the freshest and most interesting bits of the cook’s larder, but all to often the worst sort of tourist invitation to bad and overpriced food. There is, in Madrid, certainly some of the latter. But, and this is an important but, there is much more of the former.

The best example of this is Casa Patas. Located in the heart of the old city, this place is the real deal.

How real? Look again, closely, at what Casa Patas offers - for lunch. Four courses! Think warm crusty bread with olive oil; think a warm bean stew with little bits of seafood, cream, and a touch of olive oil; think braised lamb with peppers and onions; think fantastic coffee and a little panna cotta. And…a bottle of wine. That is a menu del dia that anyone could be proud of.

Oh, yeah, Casa Patas also does some flamenco, both old and new school: for example.

I’m not sure that Casa Patas should be the reason you visit Madrid, but it a strong reason for enjoying yourself once you’re there.

Olives are a fact of life around the Mediterranean. European, Arab, and Classical history abounds with the olive. In fact, you could write a book on the importance of olives in world history (and a number of folks have).  But, it is one of those few fruits, that despite its wide adoption in the United States, is still hardly known well. We know olives on pizza (black or green), in salads (ditto), with pasta, and stuffed full of wonderfulness in a martini.  But, our appreciation is limited more by quality than quantity.

And, it’s too bad.

Because a really good, fresh olive is a revelation.

Served on a plate, warmed by the sun, in their own sweet, flowery oil, Spanish green olives make the perfect beginning to something larger, or a snack designed to restore a sense of purpose while hiking through the city. These are olives that haven’t been around the block; they haven’t spent days or weeks in transit in the hold of a ship or the belly of a plane. Rather these are delivered in great buckets, slopping in oil, and taken out and put on plates by the handful.

Madrid, like most European cities, is made up of some main vector points, main avenues, main points of reference, and then somewhere around 12.43 million little streets going absolutely everywhere other than exactly where you want to go. In Madrid it is possible to get there from here, just not directly. But then, that is what makes traveling outside of the Roman gridlined cities so pleasant. For instance, New York and Boston are both wonderful cities, but Boston’s roads are made up of blacktopped cow paths, whereby those of the Big Apple are built for precision moving to and fro in carriages/cars/and someday jet packs.

So, in Madrid, should one wish to travel from, say, the Puerta del Sol to anywhere directly out of your line of site - presuming you are standing on the corner of Calle de Arenal and Calle de Preciados - then it will take you two hours. Two perfectly pleasant hours of wandering about, but two hours nonetheless.

Here’s the thing, though. All that wandering about makes for hungry wanderers.

Enter the bocadillo.

It is true that the Brits can lay a righteous claim to the best sandwiches in the world. But that claim rests on the propensity on God’s Sceptered Isle to put almost anything that can be placed between two pieces of bread between two pieces of bread. The results are often as stunningly delicious as they are confusing. Not so elsewhere, for sure.

The chorizo or jamon bocadillo is what happens when everything superfluous gets out of the way, and nothing but unencumbered (and I’m going to use a term of art here, so bear with) umph remains.

Nothing more than a delicious bit of chorizo or delicious jamon between two pieces of crispy, and often still warm bread, the bocadillo has a lot going for it. If, at the hour mark, after passing that delightful but slightly decaying monastery (for the third time), an opportunity for a glass of wine and a fortifying bocadillo presents itself, what is one to do?