La diada de Sant Jordi més memorable que he conegut mai

[muckefuck]

I was tempted to go home with monshu last night and bang out this entry while I was still stuffed and elated, rather than today when I'm hung over and facing a deadline, but what I really wanted to do was play with my new books. New books! Good friends! ROAST SUCKLING PIG! Really, it's almost impossible to conceive of a better evening. Unless I'm eating serrano ham off Richard Riehle's tummy while Blixa Bargeld plays Blur in the background, it's hard to imagine that my birthday is going to top this.

Credit goes to bunj for coming up with the idea in the first place. He was the one who discovered that Mercat a la Plantxa, the spankin' new tapas palace in the restored Blackstone Hotel, would do roast suckling pig for $35/head. When he suggested a trip, I pointed out that the feast of St George, patron of Catalonia, was just around the corner. There was a four-person minimum order, so in addition to our spouses, we recruited Nuphy so that there'd be a chance we could taste something else besides pig.

In the end, the pig was $45/head and we had six people. Nuphy's on the jury of a murder trial, so there were fears he'd be sequestered last night. I went through my mental list of friends who would be willing to show up for an pricey pork dinner at a downtown restaurant on next to no notice and came up with two names: his_regard and spookyfruit, and I wasn't too sure about spookyfruit. his_regard readily agreed, however, making me feel like a fool for not thinking of inviting him sooner.

Rendezvousing at the downstairs lounge was delightful chaos since both bunj and I arrived laden with roses and books to distribute. Before the unwrapping could commence, our table was ready, so we hauled the whole menagerie upstairs and stowed it overhead. The main dining room is immense, but it was quiet enough in our elevated corner. I was deep inside the curve of the booth, which cut off most of the view of the park, but I had plenty of spectacle in my view of the dining room.

It was soon delightfully obvious from the fuss being made over us that we were one of the first parties to ever order the cochonillo asado. Near the end of the evening, one of the hosts (really this is just an assumption on my part, see neither she or the other unliveried man who came by introduced themselves and could've just been crazy strangers) even informed us that someone from the Sun-Times was there to photograph the carcass. This also showed in the fact that they didn't seem to have portion sizes down: "Pig for four" would've easily fed twice that number. (Not that this is a complaint!)

So how was it? If you've ever had suckling pig before, you really don't need to ask: tender, juicy, delicate, and sheathed in absolutely glorious crackling. The sides were outstanding: Small white beans ("too small to be called fabas", according to e.) with loads of bacon, espinacs a la catalana (with raising so tiny and flavourful you'd think they were currants), and roast potatoes. Of the tapas we took as hors-d'œuvres, I particularly liked the coca amb botifarra and the croquetes de pernil, but they were all superb, which overcame me and my brother's objections to the fussy presentation. (Tapas are bar food, dammit, so we object on principle to gussying them up like à la nouvelle cuisine. Still, there's something undeniably charming about seeing patatas bravas as eight perfect cylinders in a line, each topped with an individual portion of allioli--or "Ay-Yolee", if you're our painfully whitebread server.)

There were, in my mind, only two near-clunkers: The "calçots" and the crema catalana. I use scare quotes in the first case, because what they served us were scallions; calçots are a particular cultivar of onion, but the larger spring onions which go by the name of "ceboll(it)os" in many of the local supermercados are a close approximation. If they'd started with these, then what reached the table wouldn't have ended up so disappointingly limp. Also the accompanying mustard sauce was puzzling; the traditional accompaniment to calçots is a version of salsa romesco, a spicy red sauce.

The crema catalana was good except for the texture, which smacked of gelatin. Fortunately, the other desserts--particularly the shot of white chocolate and their take on mel i mató--greatly outshone it. We wouldn't even have ordered them if our fantastic waiter--who by this time we trusted implicitly--hadn't talked us into it. It was tremendously amusing to see the negotiations between him and e. over the café con leche. (bunj had previously visited for lunch and some clueless wonder had given him American coffee with cream instead.) "See this window? If I get it wrong, you can throw me out it!" he told us.

All in all, it was a total lovefest. As I was squeezing out of the seat with my bags of loot (including the leftover pork which had been lovingly packed with a bit of each side in order to make a meal) and Juan-Carlos came over to collect his tip, bunj impulsively handed him his spare rose. "I'm gonna cry," the man said. "This means more to me than this," he said, indicating the stack of twenties in his other hand.

Oh, and the books? I didn't want to embarrass anyone, so I gave out only modest paperbacks and a decorative copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel that I found used. The others, by contrast, had no such qualms. monshu sprang for the comprehensive grammar of Catalan by Wheeler, Yates, and Dols which I've lusted after for simply ages, and bunj gave me Chief O'Neill's Sketchy Recollections of an Eventful Life in Chicago, the memoirs of Chicago's first Irish chief of police. Factor in the arrival of my Old Irish grammar text from Amazon, and you can well understand why it was after eleven before I nodded off.