Meson Eve

It is only now that I have been well enough to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) after yet another debauched evening in Corralejo. Thank you Laura Lush for reminding me that I ended up in Camelots dancing to rap music (hello?) and got home at 4.00 a.m. which was complete news to me.

It wasn´t until Steve (Perfect Pools) and Jane came into the bar a month ago and mentioned that José (who works at the Marquisina II by day and Oscars by night) was moving to the Marquisina for a month as Oscars was closing for complete renovation and was reopening as a tapas bar. I was so surprised by this as I have always rated Oscars in probably my top five restaurants in Corralejo and wondered why they should reinvent the place when I had every belief that they were extremely successful. That said, I always believe you can never have enough tapas bars in town and if they could produce excellent food at Oscars then no doubt their tapas would be of the same standard.

I walked past on the 1st June (their originally planned opening date – very rare to be on time here) when I noticed that they had reopened. I nipped in and had a quick scout round of the tapas and was immediately tempted to come in to try them as soon as possible. So two days later there I was with my dinner companions the recently-returned Jules and Melanie (Barfly). I love going out with Mel as she has a very small appetite and I usually end up with a doggie bag of some description. I had warned them I was really hungry and wanted to sample virtually everything on the menu. But due to the huge number of dishes available even I was going to have to choose carefully and deny myself a number of tempting dishes.

The restaurant has kept its rustic feel but the inside seating area has now been completely opened up and gives a good feeling of space to it. The bar area is at the rear of the restaurant and there must be a minimum of 20 tapas dishes on display. We chose a bottle of Viña Alcorta (for €13) and José kindly went through all the tapas with us. They have an enormous collection of different seafoods including mussels, limpets, cockles, langostines and carabineros (enormous red prawns) all which you can choose to have boiled or grilled. In fact, the list of the fish and seafood has no less than 25 dishes varying from €4 to €7 each. There are another 29 meat and vegetable dishes listed in order of price varying from €4 to €8 each as well as a cured bellota ham for €15 and a selection of Iberian cold meats for €12. They also have two daily specials which on this occasion were paella and roasted pork.

Our choices were as follows: German salad (I was asked to choose this from Birgit of Bodequita Andaluz as she has seen it on the menu and was intrigued to see how the Spanish made a German potato salad), baby beans with ham, whitebait, jamon Serrano (a huge plate of excellent quality ham), tomato bread, carabineros, choco (a superior kind of squid), garlic stewed lamb and kidneys. José was given carte blanche to bring the dishes out in whichever order he felt appropriate and the constant supply from the kitchen was efficient and possibly a little too rapid – we even asked him to slow things down a bit – which is not very usual here. We turned away the boquerones in vinegar as even I realised we had ordered way too much. We were also given a basket of very rustic looking bread – a mixture of both brown and white – with a dish of alioli.

Other slightly original more dishes on the menu include: marinated fried blue shark, battered cod strips, squid slices in garlic, chickpeas with clams and fillet of carpaccio as well as fried rabbit and fried kid.

The restaurant filled up slowly while we were there predominantly by Spanish and local majoreros and by about 10.30 the place was buzzing. There was live music there which changes frequently. I was corrected by Mel (my muso friend) that it was indeed a gentleman playing the clarinet and not a flute alongside a guitarist (der!!!). She thought they were very good and I bow to her superior musical judgement!

We felt very relaxed just slowly eating tapas after tapas while supping our second bottle of wine and we were under no pressure to rush our meal. In fact, it wasn´t until Melanie mentioned that Marina was doing her one hour flamenco show from 11 to 12 at Imagine Piano Bar that she dragged us off there. I imagine that you could probably eat here extremely late.

I am sure the restaurant will be a big hit with the tourists (as they seem to love tapas bars) but will obviously provide the local Spanish with tried and tested food that they know and love.

Unfortunately, I will always have a soft spot for Oscars and feel a little saddened by its disppearance but hey life goes and on and things change – possibly on this occasion for the better. Time will tell…….